It's not good to be thinking about nasty, unhealthy food right before a big walk, but I can't help myself. For the past few days, I've been brooding about the inadequacy of local convenience stores when it comes to providing me with the junk food that brings me the greatest joy. To be fair, it's possible to find—here in Seoul—some of the items I'm about to list, but you do have to make an effort to track these goodies down. Anyway, here we go—in no particular order, some of the 7-Eleven junk-food items for which I've been desperately jonesing for the last, oh, couple of years:
1. Spicy Jamaican beef patties. I said "no particular order," but these patties are easily my number-one item. Salty, naughty goodness. When I'm in the States, I normally buy two of them to devour greedily while I'm driving somewhere. I've tried making these here in Korea, and although they were edible, they just weren't the same.
2. Cherry Coke. This does exist here in Seoul; I've bought cans of Cherry Coke in Itaewon. But I don't like visiting Itaewon all that much, and the expat-infested district is out of my way, given that it's in the center of Seoul while I live in the southeastern corner. I need to find a service that sells Cherry Coke by the fucking crate.
3. Slim Jims. More salty nastiness. I very much want to snap into a Slim Jim, but the closest thing I can find in local groceries and convenience stores is expensive yukpo, which is beef or pork jerky. Korean stores overcharge for a bag that contains maybe a grudging ounce or two of dried meat, and while I generally like jerky of all types (even the jerky-adjacent products like dried squid and dried fish), these foods don't fill the hole in my soul.
4. Ho Hos. (Yes, I believe that's the spelling.) Looking like neat, cylindrical cat turds and tasting like every refined European's nightmare, Ho Hos date back to my childhood. This is often the way in which shitty food hooks you: it grabs you early in life, and then the nostalgia factor keeps you coming back. I've never once seen Ho Hos in Korea, but it wouldn't surprise me to find out they exist.
5. Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. One of my all-time favorite noshes, Reese's are awesome when served cold. About an hour of fridging will suffice. They do sell these in Korea, but they're not to be found everywhere. The grocery in my building used to sell Minis a few years back; like everything that I love, though, they eventually disappeared from the shelves, never to return. If I remember correctly, I blogged, during my 2017 walk, about randomly finding Reese's in a convenience store somewhere along the route to Busan. (Ah, here we go.) Every time I find these in Korea, it's an endorphin rush.
6. Honey Buns. The term "honey bun" is as much a generic name for a pastry as it is a well-known product name put out by several different companies, including that old standby, Hostess. I'm specifically referring to the honey buns that are covered in that gloriously thick, white glaze, looking for all the world as if they've just escaped from a basement where people were filming bukkake porn. God, Honey, I miss you.
7. Hostess fruit pies. These. Another powerfully evocative symbol, totem, or spirit animal from my childhood. I would sell my soul to Cthulhu for an armful of these.
8. Shasta Black Cherry soda. As I blogged in 2017, I stumbled upon this soda quite randomly, and it immediately took me back several decades. I have a reputation, among those who know me and work with me, as a Coca Cola acolyte and addict, but Shasta can easily seduce me away from the righteous Cola path. Many berry-flavored sodas can.
9. RC Cola. O Canada! Maybe this is heresy; maybe it's not, but I like RC much better than Coca Cola. It's a bit lighter and more refreshing, but without being thin and watery. Give me a choice between Coke and RC, and I'll pick RC ten times out of ten. I have never once seen RC Cola here in Seoul. Maybe it exists somewhere (like on a military base), but as far as I know, I have no easy, direct access to it. And that kills me inside.
10. Real, actual Doritos. Doritos chips are sold everywhere in South Korea, but they don't seem quite right. It's laughable to pose as some sort of junk-food connoisseur (after all, who's proud to be an authority on Doritos?), but I'm pretty sure I can taste a difference between peninsular Doritos y los Doritos americanos. Again, a trip to a military base might be the answer to this craving, but I have no way to get my own base pass. When I get back from my walk, one thing I plan to do is make my own corn chips. God knows I've got the ingredients.
11. Diet sodas other than Coke Zero. South Korea seems to think that only one brand of diet soda exists. Although the makers of Chilsung Cider (Korea's version of Sprite or Seven Up) put out a low-sugar version of their top-of-the-line clear soda a while back, it's not a zero-calorie drink by any means. Where's the Fresca? The Diet Dr. Pepper (regular Dr. Pepper is, bizarrely, available in most regular stores)? The Diet Cherry Coke? Hulk smash!
12. Good ol' Amurrican hot dogs. Korea has hot dogs up the wazoo; they're an important ingredient in that iconic fusion stew, budae-jjigae. But finding legitimate American franks is harder to do, and the Kirkland beef and pork "dinner franks" once sold at Costco seem to have gone the way of the dodo—at least at the Yangjae Costco, which I frequent. I miss my Hebrew Nationals. I sort-of miss Kirkland franks. But since this post's focus is on 7-Eleven, I'm going to risk losing three-quarters of my readership by admitting that I miss 7-Eleven hot dogs. They're big and juicy and salty and absolutely bad for you, like everything on this list. But damn, do I miss them.
I can think of several more items I miss, but it's past 4:30 a.m., and I need my ugly sleep, so I'll leave off here. In the meantime, feel free to drop me a comment in which you wax rhapsodic about food items you might be missing. This is definitely a case of "the grass is greener," but now and again, it's therapeutic to vent about what we don't and can't have.
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