My actual hometown market — not a national chain, just ours.
The receipt from that day in 2021 — the date on the tag is the proof.I didn't grow up in America. I chose it. Maybe that's why its variety still catches me off guard in small ways — things a lot of people walk past without a second thought stop me every time. This series is a record of following that curiosity around, not a guide from someone who's got it all figured out. Just someone who keeps noticing things.
We've been buying pork belly slabs from the meat counter at Adams Fairacre Farms in Poughkeepsie for at least 6-7 years now. I still remember the sound I made the first time I saw one. In 2021, we happened to film that particular slab for a video. The photo from that day is still around — the tag says 3.55 lb for $15.94, $4.49/lb. Adams isn't a national chain. It's a small, Hudson Valley-only market that happens to be mine. Looking back, this whole series probably started the day we first found that slab. Adams sits in a town (Town of Poughkeepsie, to be precise) that's roughly 65% White, with Hispanic and Black residents each around 11%. No Koreatown, no visible immigrant business district anywhere nearby. And pork belly has been there for 6-7 years.
Here's where I almost got the question wrong. I caught myself thinking, "why would a mostly-white town have pork belly?" — but that's actually the wrong question. Pork belly was never just a Korean thing. It's been a daily, generations-deep staple in the Philippines (lechon kawali) and across Latin America (chicharrón). Its rise in mainstream American food culture is much more recent, and it wasn't exactly a neutral trend either — David Chang, the Momofuku chef who predicted around 2009 that pork belly would be "the next tuna tartare," is Korean American. So this wasn't some outsider stumbling onto a trend. He brought a dish from his own roots directly onto the mainstream American stage. Even inside the story of "chefs made this trendy," Korea was already there.
So pork belly showing up in this town isn't "a white neighborhood discovered pork belly." It's closer to the opposite — the absence of a visible ethnic business district doesn't mean the absence of people who've been eating this every day for a long time. I genuinely don't know why Adams started carrying it. Maybe it followed the chef-culture trend, maybe it was reading steady demand from Hispanic customers nearby. What I do know: just because something isn't visible from the outside doesn't mean it isn't there.
I remembered an article I read years ago — something about how mainstream American chains expanding their rice selection was actually a measurable signal of a growing Hispanic population nearby, long before that community had any visible storefront presence. Walmart and Kroger reportedly adjust inventory this way — tortillas, salsa, plantains quietly show up on shelves as a neighborhood's makeup shifts, no announcement, just the shelves changing first. If pork belly followed the same pattern, it wasn't really a surprise. Just a matter of time.
I sat with why this actually made me so happy. It wasn't just "found a good, affordable ingredient." It was realizing that something Korean households crave constantly — at the dinner table, at company dinners, all the time — had been treasured for generations by a completely different culture that never crossed paths with mine. Two cultures that never met, each holding onto the same cut of meat in their own way. That's what the joy actually was. Not a discovery. A connection.
That's the whole point of this series. Every ingredient has a place where it's someone's everyday, not someone's specialty — and that's always where it's fresher and more fairly priced. And every so often, you get a cultural connection you never expected thrown in for free. You'll never see any of this if you only ever shop at one chain.
If pork belly comes up, a lot of Korean households reach for H Mart out of habit. You don't have to. At H Mart, pork belly tends to get priced like an imported specialty item.
That screenshot is actually from 2021, around the same time we found that Adams slab — I'd looked up H Mart's price back then too. At $14.99/lb for sliced BBQ-cut, it was more than 3x the Adams slab price ($4.49/lb) at the time.
So what does H Mart charge now? I checked again for this post. Sliced pork belly currently runs $11.99/lb, down a bit from 2021. An unsliced chunk (2 lb) runs $13.99 regular, $9.99 on sale — call it $5-7/lb, which is a much closer match to what the Adams slab actually was. To be fair either way, H Mart's sliced product is prepped and labor-priced, so some of the gap is real work, not just markup.
Here's the part that actually surprised me most, though. Meat in the US is generally cheaper than in Korea. So finding that H Mart's sliced price still beats out Seoul's own retail price, in a country where meat is supposed to be the cheap option, is genuinely backwards. If you're Korean and only ever shop at H Mart or a Korean grocery for Korean ingredients, that habit might be quietly costing you.
I'd actually recommend checking a neighborhood Hispanic market first — pork belly's been an everyday staple there from the start, so turnover's high and prices are honest. Adams is worth a look after that, though it's worth remembering it's not a chain you can just go find — it's a small, Hudson Valley-only market. If you're somewhere else, swap in your own version of a hometown local market instead.
That 2021 pork belly, by the way, is actually on video. If you're curious → https://youtu.be/MO3qFJmEkWk
Sumi | NYC + Hudson Valley | @miguktv on YouTube
New posts regularly — subscribe so you don't miss the next one.
Ever caught yourself thinking "wait, why does this store have that?" Tell me about it in the comments.
pork belly, H Mart, Adams Fairacre Farms, Hudson Valley, multicultural America, grocery shopping, hometown market, miguktv
Comments
Post a Comment