32 THENEWYORKER, MARCH 9, 2020
becoming an interpreter, Lucia had
worked at a hospital reading pathol
ogy slides, a job she chose because her
sister had died of cancer. She found
the work discouraging: “You aren’t re
ally able to help people.” She began
to travel, for months at a time, which
surprised her friends, because she had
always been frugal, not even buying
coffee when they met. Living abroad,
she soon learned other languages, in
cluding English, and decided to go to
school in order to work as an interpreter.
“My parents come from a very conser
vative area outside of Seoul,” she told
me. “In my family they have a schol
arship, but it’s only for boys.” By “my
family,” she meant an extended group
of relations involving some two thou
sand people. She paid for her school
ing herself.
On our way to meet Lee EunS u,
the founder of the Nowon Urban
Farming Network, an organization that
has a hundred and thirty members,
Lucia told me that she had loved read
ing up on composting—she wanted to
make sure that she would be familiar
with any specialized vocabulary. Being
environmentally conscious is “popu
lar” among young people, she said.
“When I visited Taiwan, I saw drinks
being served with stainlesssteel straws
in a restaurant.” The Taiwanese gov
ernment had placed lim
itations on the use of plas
tic straws. “I thought the
straws were ‘cool,’ so I
purchased one when I got
back to Korea.” She smiled.
She said that Seoul is
now also imposing limits
on plastic straws. For her
birthday, she bought gifts
for her friends—reus
able water bottles. At the
end of our subway ride, she showed
me where the tickets were recycled.
L
ee EunSu, a slim, cheerful, and en
ergetic fiftyfiveyearold, told me
that he “wakes up thinking about urban
farming and goes to sleep to dream about
urban farming.” He is very much a city
person. His parents moved to Seoul
from the countryside when he was
young. “It was the best decision they
made in their lives,” he said. He comes
from a family of four children. His fa
ther was too ill to work, and his mother
made money selling things in the street.
The Nowon district, where Lee lives, is
a middle class neighborhood known
for its good schools.
Lee used to work installing cable in
apartment buildings. He found him
self in basements and on roofs. “That
was when I saw all this unused space,”
he said. “A waste!” He moved into a
small apartment with his family, and
now makes a modest living as a land
lord, so that he can devote himself to
promoting urban farming throughout
Seoul. “It’s like a university, and I get
to be a professor,” he said. He tapped
his chest and grinned. “I was the one
who proposed growing mushrooms
in the basements,” he added. Sunnier
urban farm spaces grow lettuces, cab
bages, peppers, peas, and flowers. Many
of the organicsrecycling bins in Seoul
have the capacity to transform waste
into compost, which can then be dis
tributed to urban farms, sometimes in
the same apartment complex. In the
past decade, the number of such farms
in Seoul has increased from sixtysix
to more than two thousand.
In a concrete highrise bordered by
a covered highway, we headed into the
basement by ducking beneath a stair
case lined with pictures of four varie
ties of mushroom. Each fungus looked
spookier than the next: the
shiitake, the golden oyster, the
deer horn, the lion’s mane.
Gathered in the basement
were members of the build
ing’s Urban Farming Com
mittee. They were mostly
older women, faces bright
ened with lipstick. They led
us around their projects, small
rooms lit by bluish lights.
Cylinders of gauzewrapped
compost sat on metal racks; from the
cylinders emerged what looked like
sepia alien hands: deerhorn mush
rooms. The rooms were humid and
cool, and smelled like loam. A delicate
tubular watering system wove through
out the metal racks. The effect was part
scifi, part night club.
On a table in an adjacent space, a
crowd of fullgrown deerhorn mush
rooms, potted and wrapped in cello
phane, might have been cousins to
Christmas poinsettias. We were each
given a pot. It was the day before the
Korean holiday known as Gaecheon
jeol, or National Foundation Day. (The
holiday commemorates the founding
myth of the Korean people, which in
volves a bear and a tiger that both
wanted to be human. Only the bear
was patient enough.) One of the women
explained that the mushrooms are often
used to make a tea that is sometimes
sweetened with dates.
Later, Lee showed us the compost
ing system he had set up in a building
where he keeps a tiny, crowded office.
He has a lot of uses for compost: he has
transformed the entire roof area—and
a platform above it, near the cable and
the water system—into a garden, where
he grows marigolds, squash, mint, a date
tree, and more. Lee has also made a “green
curtain,” a trellis of various climbing
vines, above the building’s parking area.
Under an eave, a large barrel had been
set up on a rotating metal stand, like a
Foosball figure on a pole; this makes it
easy to turn the compost, to aerate it.
Lee unscrewed the lid of the barrel, re
vealing a dark mixture inside that smelled
slightly of cleaning product.
In the course of weeks or months,
billions of microorganisms feed on the
carbon and nitrogen in the compost
ing mixture. Dry and brown organic
matter provides carbon; green matter
provides nitrogen. As the microorgan
isms process the mixture, they need
oxygen, which is usually generated by
stirring. Not enough oxygen, and the
compost will smell like rotten eggs; too
much nitrogen, and the compost will
smell like ammonia; a good ratio of el
ements, and the compost will simply
smell like fresh earth.
Lee deposited a small bucket of food
scraps into the barrel, sprinkling wood
chips (for more carbon) on top. He then
poured in a brown liquid from an old
detergent bottle—microorganisms. He
restored the lid and rotated the barrel
a few times. “That’s it,” he said. Then
we went out for bubble tea.
During a brief break, I called home.
My sixyearold shouted into the phone,
“So they’re good at composting—come
home now! And bring Pokémon sou
venirs!” In my next chat across the globe,
my mom said that, when she was a kid,
in Tel Aviv, composting was done the
oldfashioned way: people went into
