Mad Cow Craze

All those other protests I witnessed were nothing compared to the recent ones. Forty thousand Koreans took to the streets of Seoul in protest of US beef imports. They're not violent compared to an event of similar magnitude in the States, but heck, still pretty wild.

They're worried about mad cow disease, which can be caused by old cows that eat "recycled" feed. So the import agreement was no bones, and after a few incidents of them finding single bone fragments in shipments of hundreds of tons, they want to boycott US beef. I guess they don't mind paying an average of $50/kg of beef - it's not like they have any, well many, cows in Korea. Big enough issue to plummet the approval rating of the new president to below 30% - the same president that won the elections by an unprecedented landslide only last year. Crazy times!