Out of Eden Walk: Cellophane oasis

Paul Salopek:Yeah. So South Korea is, as I understand it, kind of the world capital of convenience stores. It has more than 55,000 of them. So, they’re everywhere. And so we’d be out walking, through rice paddies or over wooded mountains, aiming for … what next, of course? The next convenience store. Because they basically acted as a modern-day caravanserai on this journey.

Everybody gets their favorite item, me and my walking partner. I kind of fell into an egg salad sandwich–iced coffee combo. So, yeah. All the food is actually quite fresh. It’s amazing. Some of it’s quite healthy.

I mean, everything. One of the amazing things about these stores, and if you want to compare them to, say, stores that I grew up with in North America, is that the variety of things is astonishing. They have like 98% of all the material culture of the planet. It’s like … You need computer cables? They got computer cables. You need socks? They’ve got socks. You need medical supplies? They’ve got medical supplies. But they also have quite a range of foods, from kind of unhealthy — the usual junk food — to very healthy foods, freshly daily-made salads with six different kinds of dressings. Rice balls. Even tofu. I mean, tofu. I mean, think about it. Tofu at a convenience store.

You know, it must go back to the very earliest settlements, right? It must go back to the end of nomadism and the beginning of agriculture or towns and cities where merchants and travelers would have a place to go, probably an open market space. Imagine an alleyway with cobbled lanes, and there were hawkers selling whatever was fresh and available from the farms. That model is probably ancient, and in some parts of the world, like China, you still find it. [In] Silk Road times, you know, these caravanserai, these caravan stops in the deserts of Central Asia that I walked through, were walled fortresses against raiders. But inside, you had almost everything you needed. You had forage for your animals. You had a fountain to wash in and to wash your clothes in. You had a balcony that would catch a breeze. You’d have a hookah to puff on. And, of course, you would have food. So, these kinds of comforts that were proffered to travelers are very old. And every time I step into a 7-Eleven, a Lawson’s or a Familymart in South Korea, I kind of do a little bow to this legacy of traveler’s comforts along a very long trail through the centuries.

Well, that traverse took us about two months. So, with that 60 days or so, I would say at least 60 [convenience stores], of course, we were stopping at them every day.

You know, walking out of Africa over the last 12 years, I mostly did not stop at convenience stores, right? I was, you know, eating in people’s homes, which is wonderful. Stopping at open bazaars and street markets, where street food is delicious and you get to have a conversation with a stranger. Convenience stores don’t quite live up to that kind of a human interaction. But the ones in Asia — and a lot has been written about this — are a different beast altogether than the ones, say, in North America. The ones in North America are often associated with food deserts. The food that they sell is often very unhealthy. But the convenience stores that I mentioned earlier in South Korea were a marvel of kind of multitasking; not just food, not just kind of other products, but they served as mail centers to deliver and pick up mail. They had banking centers. Multipurpose. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, the contrast, and here’s something about two different convenience store cultures: You know, I’m pretty sure being a convenience store clerk in South Korea is not a high-prestige job, and it’s probably not that well paid. But it probably is nothing compared to the fellow clerks [who] worked with me at a convenience store outside of Chicago, where I worked for nine months as a reporter, doing kind of a long story. And where I stocked more than 100 kinds of sugary drinks into these gigantic coolers. And, you know, mopped the bathrooms [and] did everything a convenience store clerk is obliged to do. My colleagues back in America were what economists would kind of coldly call the “working poor.” Tough, innovative people, but living kind of by their fingernails, right? Some of them were massively in debt and were eating convenience store junk food as freebies because they couldn’t afford to get healthier food. So yeah, it brought back some sobering memories of the junk food culture of American convenience stores.

I think that the very fact that at this point in history, a certain number of privileged people around the planet, i.e., in developed economies, have the ability to kind of stop almost at will at this establishment beside the road and satisfy their immediate needs efficiently, conveniently, right? And so, compared to how much labor in the past, through thousands of years, has gone into gathering food [and] getting vital supplies for daily life, nobody’s walking through snowdrifts, right, from the farm to get food. This is like, you park your car, and it’s all there. And, I think, hopefully we have a bright future. But, you know, the world is a chaotic place. There are kind of turbulent horizons ahead. I suspect we might be looking back on this as a convenience store “glory age” when you could do this.

Up to a point. Because after 60 convenience stores, you start wondering and hoping for some serendipity, right? But yes. Yeah, your point is well made.

Oh, let me tell you. You know, there’s a big, big debate. It’s a big controversy. Which country in Asia has the best egg salad sandwich? Japan and South Korea are, like, running neck and neck. About the creaminess factor. Not too sweet. The consistency of the bread. Yeah. I mean, it’s another radio show, Carolyn.