“The most popular substitute food in those days was rice bran cake, pine bark cake, wormwood cake and cake made with wine lees. Rice bran, which is called Mi-Gang in North Korea, is the powder produced in the process of polishing brown rice. My grandmother kneaded the powder and made us rice cake in a cauldron. We waited for the rice cake to be cooked, and because there was not enough firewood, the flame was not strong enough the wait felt like a couple of decades. My little brother, who could not wait for the cauldron to finally boil, started saying, ‘You no good ass, you better boil soon…’ but eventually he fell asleep before the cake was done”.
“The days we ate pine bark cake were Christmas to us. If you remove the thick, tough outer layer of pine trees, there’s another layer before you get to the white flesh of the tree. There’s a thin brown film between the outer skin and the white core. People peel off that thin film and pound it into fine powder. Then they add a couple tablespoons of flour to make a cake. So, basically, it is a cake made with tree bark and it actually tasted quite decent. However, it had one severe side effect: My little brother, the youngest, ate the cake and got constipation that was so bad that it caused him to burst into tears. Remembering my little brother sobbing loudly, now my heart aches again because he is still in North. He was only 4 then, way too young to understand the hardships of life”.
“My mother planted cucumbers in the back yard. However, perhaps because of the drought, the cucumber vine hardly produced even a single skinny cucumber. It took a long time for the cucumber to grow to the size of a middle finger. Because of the weather, all sorts of crops could not grow well then. My mom forbid us from eating the cucumber because, she said, we all should share it. I was tempted to pick the cucumber and eat it more than a dozen times a day, but I was strong enough to resist to the urge. However, one day, I was surprised to see just part of the cucumber dangling on the vine, the rest of it bitten off”…
☛ Next Up: Inside North Korea: Unbelievable Excerpts From UN Report #3
