“If North Koreans Could See the Beef Protests…”
That’s what Chosun Ilbo blogger has been wondering about. The author has been to North Korea and reports that anyone there would leap at the chance to eat the US beef which South Koreans are rejecting, and includes several photos of cows in farming villages there.
The day that North Korean citizens eat beef is the day that a cow has died from overwork or disease.
Even though they can buy other meats, because they have to kill the cow themselves and it provides them with food, they do not normally think of it as a food animal. The beef I ate in North Korea was totally dry and had not a drop of grease, like eating a tire. This is because the only cows they can eat have been worked to the bone for 10 to 15 years.
Cows less than 30 months old are for the wealthy, of course — high-ranking politicians and army commanders.
In some areas there are special farms for raising calves for those elites, and ordinary people may not enter them.
In North Korea, lacking adequate fuel supplies, all work is done with cows instead. There is heavy reliance on wagons and carts pulled by cows. In the event of war these carts would be unable to manuever through the mountainous Korean peninsula, but their use continues to expand.
If a farming village has no cows it cannot farm. So it is rare to see a fattened cow in a world where even humans cannot eat. Before these hungry times the villages used to take great pride in setting their prize bulls to fight one another.
In the mid-1990s, when many people were starving to death, anyone who was caught eating cow would be publicly executed. Failure to properly take care of a farm cow leading to its death meant long imprisonment.
Prison sentences for eating a cow are from 5 to 10 years.
The cows sent by former CEO Jeong Ju-yeong were actually put to work on farms, and it is said that they had a hard time adjusting to North Korean farm work after having perviously had an easy life and eaten only good food in North Chosun. According to defectors, almost none of the cows delivered by Jeong Ju-yeong were fit for heavy loads.
It is believed that later they were sent to the army, which did have enough provisions.
Now the Rodong Shinmun is propagandizing that South Chosun people are in an anti-government struggle, with headlines like “South Chosun Citizens Will Not Eat US Beef Over 30 Months Old” and “American Cows Are Crazy Cows”. But the people of North Korea find this very difficult to understand. North Koreans think that the South Korean government, the US-created puppet state, is forcing the people of South Chosun to eat beef that even Americans won’t eat because it has mad cow disease.
People who listen to the government or the radio think that the population of South Chosun is in the grip of hunger.
At the end of the 1990s, tons of chilled beef from Germany was brought to North Korea. North Korea asked for it because otherwise it was to be destroyed for potentially containing mad cow disease. It is said the army and the citizens of Pyeongyang battled for the right to eat this beef.
Criticism of the beef eaten by Americans and two million gyopos as “crazy cows” strikes me as a little excessive. In the view of hungry North Koreans, the beef protests are nothing but an outrage.