Meat-Counter Confusion in S. Korea

Shoppers Struggle to Sort Out the Truth About Risks in Chicken and U.S. Beef

SEOUL -- It's been a spooky spring in the beef-and-poultry aisle. South Korean shoppers have had to wrestle with risks real and rumored, domestic and imported, pathogenic and political.

More than 6 million fowl were exterminated to halt a nationwide epidemic of bird flu. The cull included every single known chicken, duck and goose in greater Seoul.

The strain of Asian bird flu that swept across South Korea, it turned out, was different from that found in Vietnam and Indonesia, which in rare cases jumps to humans and sometimes kills them.

Risky or not, poultry consumption plunged. The chicken business here lost about $6 billion in two months. It nearly ground to a halt after a report that a South Korean soldier might have been infected with bird flu. He wasn't. Indeed, no humans were.

The head of the Korea Chicken Foodservice Association, Yoon Hong-geun, said the chicken trade has picked up smartly in the past couple of weeks, mostly because scary stories about chicken were elbowed out of the news by scary stories about beef.

To keep current on beef, a conscientious shopper in this country needs a microbiology textbook, a political pollster and a scorecard.

In April, just before meeting with President Bush in Washington, newly elected President Lee Myung-bak lifted a 4 1/2 -year ban on the import of U.S. beef. He said it no longer posed a threat of infecting Koreans with mad cow disease.

On Tuesday, after weeks of street protests, plunging poll numbers and panic in his party, Lee changed his mind and reimposed part of the ban. That, in turn, riled the United States. U.S. Ambassador Alexander Vershbow tut-tutted Koreans for ill-informed fears and suggested that they "learn more about the science."

And that riled a great many South Koreans, who interpreted the ambassador's remarks as an insult to a society where students have for years been among the top achievers in international science testing, far ahead of the United States.

Vershbow apologized Thursday, saying, "I have the highest regard for the educational level of Koreans and respect their concerns about food safety."

So, where does all this leave a homemaker who wants to feed her family?

"I stopped buying chicken months ago," said Min Hoo-hwa, 37, who was shopping this week for her husband and 6-year-old daughter.