Positive Liberty

I’m in love with Han Ah Reum.

No, I’m not jeopardizing my recent gay marriage. Han Ah Reum is a Korean grocery store in Ellicott City. It’s also one of the few food markets for which “love” is probably an understatement. I rarely shop anywhere else, and when I do it is usually to buy a small core of die-hard Euro-American products that have never made it in Asian cuisine. Look into my cart on those trips and you might think that I survive on a diet of nothing but yogurt, cheese, and butter. At HAR, everything else you can imagine is either cheaper, or better, or both.

It doesn’t hurt that I also happen to adore traditional Korean cooking. I’ve developed a taste for it living in Glen Burnie, Maryland, a town with a large immigrant population and two excellent Korean restaurants. Han Ah Reum boasts a kimchi for every palate, plus other typically Korean products like brown rice tea, hot pepper paste, and a wide selection of prepared snacks and beverages not easily found elsewhere.

The clientele is by no means entirely Korean. Walking down the aisles of Han Ah Reum, one can find people of almost every ethnicity, age, gender, religion, and culinary persuasion. The diversity makes the place something more than a grocery store; it is also a powerful demonstration of everything that’s good about America. Han Ah Reum is the very incarnation of the messy, vivacious free market that has always kept the United States strong. No doubt the management is closer to the immigrant experience than most of us, for the proprietors of Han Ah Reum have given their store a cosmopolitan air that keeps Americans of all persuasions coming back again and again.

The produce section is usually the first stop. Asian standards like bitter melon, daikon, bok choi, and Thai hot peppers are all well-represented; so too are vegetables from many other culinary traditions, including greenhouse-fresh herbs from the European repertoire, plus plantains, dates, yams, tomatoes, and habanero peppers. Fresh mushrooms have a section to themselves; there one finds fungi in all shapes and sizes, from fat, squat portabellas to graceful, needle-like enoki. Feeling brave? Try something you’ve never had before, like kombu, aloe, eddo, or pummelo. This last–imagine an enormous, extra-sweet grapefruit–is one of our all-time favorites. You say potato? I say batatta. Yes, they have those too. I’d tell you what batatta are like, but I haven’t had a chance to try one yet. Lastly, if you want something mild or traditional, you can find it here too; HAR’s salad greens are always wonderfully fresh, and their bell peppers are both larger and cheaper than any I’ve ever seen. You can take your pick of mild persimmons from either Korea or Israel, or choose eggplant from Thailand, India, or Chile.

Noodles, spices, teas, rice, beans… The staples at Han Ah Reum definitely incline toward Asia, though Goya, a company specializing in Mexican foods, is well-represented also. Seaweeds, dried shrimp, tinned sardines, and mysterious entities whose culinary uses and even biological kingdoms cannot readily be discerned–These are the joys of a true Han Ah Reum fan. A bag of a nondescript grayish dusty substance advertises itself as “Old Tasty Malt Powder.” It is produced by “The Company Which Is Honest.”

“Malt powder?” I asked myself as I looked at the bag. Hmm… If it were barley malt, I could use it in my longtime hobby of making homebrew beer. Pound for pound, the stuff is far cheaper than Maryland Homebrew’s. I’m a good consumer, though, and ever suspicious. I read the label:

“Ingredients: Malt.”

Technically speaking, “malt” isn’t an ingredient. It’s a process of converting complex sugars into simpler ones. It is possible to make malted barley, wheat, corn, soybeans, and–of course–milk. Malt by itself is nothing. It’s like asking someone to buy “fried.” I decline, and here again is a lesson in capitalism: Some products succeed; others fail. The process happens in slow-motion at Han Ah Reum, put into sharper relief by an immigrant population that no doubt knows precisely what it’s getting in a bag of Old Tasty Malt Powder. Providing consumers with inadequate information, on the other hand, is a sure route to failure. Leaving behind this distressing example, we turn to the meat and seafood departments.

Here await the wonders of the unseen world. Humanity’s great religions and ethical systems go their separate ways when it comes to the uncanny practice of consuming other animals. Some people refrain from pork and shellfish; others will not eat beef. Still others eat no animals at all, abstaining even from milk and honey for fear of unfairly exploiting the creatures that produce them. The clientele at HAR picks and chooses, but the free market supplies in abundance.

As for me, taboo is the only taboo. I eat everything, and Han Ah Reum does its best to keep me well-supplied. Particularly attractive are the always-available ducklings, the thin-sliced raw beef brisket for Vietnamese pho, and the wide selection of fresh whole fish. To be served a whole fish is a great privilege in many Asian cuisines, and the head is considered the best part of all.

“I don’t eat anything with a face on it,” is a common complaint of the picky American eater, and Han Ah Reum probably repels a lot of these people. My only reply is to say that food is real, folks… It comes from real plants and animals that had real lives and real connections to the earth, just like you do. You can hide those connections, rationalize them away, or make them taboo if you like, but they don’t disappear. My father used to say that before being counted a full citizen, everyone should have to personally raise, harvest, kill, gut, and prepare every part of an American ordinary meal. While I’m too libertarian to make such an elaborate policy recommendation, I still think he’s got a point. We’ve forgotten a lot as we’ve climbed up the industrial food chain.

I am not an animal rights activist–quite the opposite. I have no moral problem whatsoever with eating animals, for it is a fact of life that animals eat other animals. I do think, though, that we need to get over the silly ignorance and squeamishness we have about food. I once met someone who didn’t know that shrimp were animals at all–He thought that “shrimp” just sprouted on the ocean floor, already pink and curled up in little ringlets. Similarly, a visitor to my parents’ house once asked to see the garden; my father pointed out the carrot patch. “But where are the carrots?” he asked. He didn’t know that the orange part grows underground. Take two old truisms and put them together: You are what you eat; know thyself. The result is oddly profound.

But back to Han Ah Reum. If you ever get a sudden urge to try conch, razor clams or a large whole squid, you now know where to find them. Quail eggs? Check. Pickled lotus root? Check. Cuttlefish dumplings? Check… For Christmas, my husband bought me a Korean barbecue grill from the housewares section. It burns liquid butane and sits comfortably on any dining-room table. Cuttlefish dumplings are delicious when grilled. HAR has a cosmetics department, a bakery, and a lunch counter with sushi. An aisle of sauces and beverages, a freezer section, and a refrigerator aisle round out the store. As a finishing touch, the music is mostly Asian disco, though the last time I went, Han Ah Reum was playing “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.” There may be strength in diversity, but at Han Ah Reum what you notice is the fun.

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