Where Is the Most Garlic Eaten?
Where in the world is the most garlic eaten? Maybe you’re thinking Spain, with all those liters of aioli, or France, with those bunches of garlic in every restaurant. Wrong—the most garlic is eaten in…
On the online platform Quora, travel and garlic lovers share their experiences with one another. Where did they come across the most garlic ? Opinions differ: Spain, Mexico, South Korea, Mongolia. Neil writes: ‘Mexican cookbooks have recipes that call for bulbs of garlic, not cloves. And Spain uses a lot of garlic too. Aioli alone contains a mountain of it! And maybe Italy is also a strong contender?’
Dipping garlic in garlic
According to John, the country with the biggest garlic eaters is South Korea. He hasn’t been there himself, but he worked in Saudi Arabia on a team with many people from South Korea who ate mountains of garlic. After a while, he could no longer smell it; his nose had become completely insensitive to it. Their favorite dish? ‘A bowl of garlic purée with a small bowl of garlic cloves. Then you take a garlic clove, run it through the purée and eat it. It was a side dish with dinner. I tried it, nearly choked, my colleagues laughed loudly, and that was that.’
8 to 12 cloves… per day
The world’s largest garlic producer is in any case China. And they largely eat their own production themselves: average consumption is 14.3 kilos of garlic per person per year. Other countries on that bizarre hit list: North Korea eats 6.2 kilos per person per year, every inhabitant of Bangladesh gets through 2.2 kilos, just like in Russia, and in Indonesia they easily reach 1.8 kilos per person.
A study in the New York Times produces different figures again. According to the NYT, the average Chinese person eats just as much garlic as someone from Korea or… Italy: 8 to 12 cloves every day.
Yurt and garlic
So China and Korea are the top countries when it comes to garlic, but during her travels in Mongolia, Jan encountered even more garlic. ‘The entire country smells of garlic and mutton, from early morning until late at night,’ she writes. ‘After a while, my clothes started to smell of it too. I also had the feeling that every dish tasted like it. These days there’s also KFC in the capital, Ulaanbaatar, so perhaps things have changed, but if you sleep in yurts and stay with local people in the interior, you’ll get plenty of garlic on your plate.’
Read also:
- How to make the most delicious roasted garlic from the oven
- Large garlic prawns with white wine
- An ode to garlic sauce
