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Carrots
Carrots are derived from a Middle Eastern crop called Queen Anne’s Lace. This wild ancestor is also a taproot crop but has a white root. For thousands of years, the carrot was not a popular vegetable because it had a woody texture and was difficult to eat. A subspecies of this plant has been selectively bred over centuries to produce the crisp and sweet garden vegetables that we eat today. Today the largest producers of carrots are China, the United States, Poland, Japan, and France.
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Liberation Story
Not everyone who calls themselves Korean today lives in Korea. In Uzbekistan you may meet some people who call themselves Korean. This is because they had to move many times from Korea, to Russia, to Uzbekistan.In the early 1900s, many Koreans were moving to Russia to escape Japanese colonization. They were called “Soviet-Koreans” or “Koryo-saram”.
In the 1930s, the Russian government was worried these people might become foreign spies or double agents for Japan, so they forced these Koryo-Saram to move again. This time, they had to go by train to Uzbekistan, over 3,000 miles west from their homes.
Koryo-saram lost their connections to their houses, their land, and their language. But, they held onto their culture through food traditions. The most famous example is a carrot kimchi called Morkovcha or “Korean carrots”. They didn’t have napa cabbage for making traditional Korean kimchi. So, they used carrots instead. To this day, Morkovcha is served in Uzbek restaurants and homes around the world.