The Raunchy Hongseong Garlic

A South Korean community was roasted over their raunchy garlic ad that some people said stank of obscenity.

The controversy surrounded a 30-second video that had been posted on a YouTube channel for Hongseong County, a small town of about 100,000 people in Chungcheongnam-do known for their local “Hongsan” (renamed “Hongseong” since January) garlic, for about two years.  

The video showed a woman touching the thigh of a man named “Hongsan” with a full garlic head mask and saying words like “very thick” and “hard” to apparently describe the quality of the local garlic. It was also a parody of a famous scene from a 2004 hit Korean movie titled “Once Upon a Time in High School” (말죽거리 잔혹사). 

The spicy ad, which reportedly generated about 190,000 views, had been largely under the radar, but began to get noticed when it was aired on electronic billboards at a Seoul express bus terminal and a downtown street in the central city of Daejeon last month. 

Someone saw the video and notified some farmers’ groups, while South Korean media also began reporting about it, leaving a bad taste in many people’s mouths. 

“We can’t repress our astonishment”, said a joint statement issued by the local branches of two major farmers’ organizations – the Korean Peasants League and the Korean Women Peasants Association. “The video offended the people who watched it and dealt a big blow to the image of the agricultural product that farmers have laboriously grown”. 

Calling the video “suggestive” and “inappropriate,” the statement said it “sexually objectified” garlic. 

Hongseong officials said on August 03 they had withdrawn the said video from their YouTube channel and had stopped airing it on billboards a week earlier. 

I learned that South Koreans believe garlic (Scientific name: Allium sativum), one of the essential ingredients in Korean cuisine, boost stamina. Some think it can even improve men’s sexual functions as well. 

During the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, the country’s women’s curling team earned the nickname of “Garlic Girls” – four of the team’s five members came from another rural town known for their own famed garlic – as they had a fairy-tale run to win the silver medal.