Troop hot pot is a Korean invention.

It was a product of a special time.

The Korean War had just ended and all of South Korea, except for the Pusan area, had been beaten to death.

There were few houses left in all of South Korea, and farmland had long been abandoned due to the war and the killing or fleeing of farmers.

When U.S. troops arrived in South Korea, they found that they could not get even the most basic food and vegetables, let alone fruit.

Throughout the Korean War, most of the food for the U.S. and South Korean armies was transported to South Korea from Japan and even further afield.

For this reason, the U.S. military built many large cold storage facilities in South Korea to store this food.

Naturally, most of the food and vegetables were still canned for military convenience.

There was a famine in South Korea at the time, and Lee Seung-man pleaded with the Americans for relief.

The Americans then gave their own military food to the South Korean government for local relief efforts.

So, most of the South Korean people had eaten American military food back then and were not strangers to it.

Because there was so much American aid, all kinds of canned goods were brought to the market.

It was also said above that South Korean agriculture had almost collapsed at that time, and small restaurants could only get a small amount of seasonal vegetables, but meat was completely unavailable.

So many small restaurants in Korea used American canned luncheon meat, canned ham, canned sausage, and so on.

And at the time, South Korean soldiers liked to come out in groups to eat after vacation.

There were so many of them that restaurants often couldn't serve them on one plate.

In order to make money, the restaurant thought of a good way. It is to take these U.S. military cans, pour them directly into a big pot, and then with kimchi, onions, green onions, baked beans, bacon, cheese slices, ramen noodles, rice cakes and other messy things, with the Korean favorite bitter pepper sauce (a spicy soup), to make a big hot pot.

The restaurant simply washes the ingredients, cuts them up, and throws them directly into the hot pot to simmer, without taking the time to cook them one by one, making for a very short production time.

Naturally, this kind of messy stew destroys the flavor of the food, and the whole pot becomes flavorful.

But what the soldiers have not eaten, starvation is a common change, and do not care about these flavors.

This kind of hot pot doesn't need a cook to cook, and the stuff inside is rich, and you can drink and eat at the same time.

The South Korean soldiers were satisfied, and the restaurant was much more relaxed, and everyone was happy.

Since the stuff was originally eaten by soldiers, the common people called it Johnson Soup (, Johnson Soup), which is a combination of the last name of U.S. Senator, and later U.S. President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and the Korean word for "soup" (?) in Korean. combined to form the name.

The troop hot pot emerged in the 1950s and is still eaten in Korea to this day.

It should be noted that troop hot pot is definitely not made from food waste thrown out by the U.S. military, which would have caused South Korean soldiers to smash up the restaurant long ago.

But it's actually not very healthy.

After South Korea's economy took off, the troop hot pot was phased out of the market.

That's because inside those cans for troops, processed foods are often pickled, colored and preserved with coloring and preservatives, and high in fat and sodium for long preservation.

For example, the U.S. military's lunch meat, in addition to providing calories, is actually very unhealthy and prone to various diseases, and also increases the burden on the heart and kidneys.

And preservatives are also more likely to cause cancer when used over time.

But in other words, what choice was there in those days?

Soldiers were lucky to have meat to eat. South Korea was still poor, and many country folk didn't even have enough roughage to eat.

It was good enough for soldiers to be able to go out on vacation, have a small drink and eat a hot pot full of meat.

That makes me hungry.