Remembering 'barley height'
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By Lee Hyon-chol
After the Korean War, during the late 1950s to the early 1970s, Koreans still had a difficult time getting food for their families. Parents were eager to give children at least some food at every meal.
By late May to June every year when our barley fields were covered with their amber color, we were running out of food everywhere. This period just before the barley or wheat harvests was called “barley height.” It was a metaphor for the hardship of life as if we climbed the high hill without any food all day long.
Our parents, especially mothers, however, equipped with some traditional wisdom, tried their best to provide food for their children. They changed our food from a bowl of rice to a bowl of barley, or a bowl of a stew type meal mixed with rice, barley, beans and some edible herbs. Moms collected several kinds of herbs, which we were able to fill our stomachs with. These were wild herbs like mugwort, shepherd's purse and sowthistle among others.
I wonder if our younger generation have any idea which plants are edible and which are deadly if they should ever be forced to live without any food except what they could find in the wilderness or forest for even a couple of days.
It is said that when an African country had experienced civil war, the people were driven from their city homes into the thick jungle. They were starving, because they didn't have any knowledge about what could be eaten or what couldn’t. Their ancestors had carried this knowledge with them, but the city dwellers had stopped passing it on to their offspring.
The former urbanites, now living in the bush, cooked various plants and fed them to their chickens to see if the chickens would survive or not. Gradually they found their way to the traditional knowledge base and could then tell one another what was edible. The revived tradition has become survival knowledge.
In the early spring this year when my wife cooked hot mugwort soup several times, we were wondering if our daughters-in-law had the knowledge or recipes instructing them how to cook mugwort soup for their families. We even wondered if they know which plants are edible or harmful.
We should pass the traditional knowledge to the children before the knowledge completely dies so that they can overcome on their own the Barley Height if and when it should happen.
The writer is a former professor of Changshin University in Changwon. Write him at eleichc@ hanmail.net.