How much is that doggie on the menu?

What is this we're eating?" I ask my Korean friend Jemin, who's treating me to dinner in a back-alley Pusan restaurant. We're tucking in to a thick stew of green onions, sesame leaves, shredded ginger, crushed red peppers, fermented soybean paste and a very dark, tender meat. It tastes great.

"It's bokk-um," he replies.

"Duh," I say. Bokk-um is a general Korean word for pan-broiled food. "What kind of bokk-um?"

Jemin begins to giggle. "Mung-mung tang."

Anyone with basic Korean knows that tang means stew. However, only those who have spent time with Korean children know what mung-mung means. Having tutored my share of kids during a teaching stint here three years ago, I know that mung-mung means "bow-wow".

In terms of western taboos, eating a dog ranks right up there along with practicing polygamy, exploiting child labour and smoking crack cocaine. Even die-hard beefeaters consider eating dog meat to be an unspeakable deviance. After all, dogs have personality, loyalty and charm. Cows, on the other hand, are ambivalent, dimwitted and terrible at catching Frisbees.

In Korea, however, dog meat stew (known commonly as boshin-tang, or "health-enhancement stew") is believed to be an energy-restoring health food, and many men swear by its power to increase sexual potency - a Korean folk version of Viagra, if you will.

Despite its allure, dog meat stew is technically illegal. The Korean government banned its sale and consumption just before the 1988 Seoul Olympics, in the hope of avoiding negative international publicity. While reference to the dish was erased from restaurant menus across Korea, the dish itself did not in fact disappear from restaurant kitchens.

Fourteen years after the official prohibition of dog meat in Korea, approximately 4,000 restaurants nationwide still serve it, according to a recent Reuters report. Although the ban has been enforced in a handful of highly publicised instances over the years - perhaps most famously in 1992, when a ship carrying 13.9 tons of dog meat from El Salvador was turned away by customs officials in Pusan - no serious legal action has been taken since 1996, when a man charged with selling $500,000-worth of dog meat to restaurants was acquitted on the grounds that his product was sanitary, edible and popular. Now that the 2002 World Cup is focusing international attention on Korea, the practice of eating dog is once again a subject of cultural controversy.

Amidst this emotional debate, a question remains: why is eating dog meat so popular in Korea, while the very thought of such a practice provokes revulsion in the United States? I often asked this question during my two-year stint in Korea, and the most common answer I received was that Koreans eat only ddong-gae (literally, "shit dogs") - semi-feral mutts that are not fed by caring owners, but survive on garbage and faeces. In other words, Koreans consider pet dogs different from food dogs in the same way that we distinguish catfish from canned tuna.

Even domestic dogs in Korea have never really been considered pets in the sentimentalised Lassie sense of the word. To this day, many older Koreans - raised on the ideal of duty to family - are as put off by the western love of dogs as westerners are put off by Koreans' taste for dog meat. Why, they wonder, do we gladly spend hours teaching our dogs to do silly tricks, yet consider it an act of extreme generosity and sacrifice to go to the care home and chat with our grandmothers once a week?

Historically, both old world and new world cultures used dogs as a source of food when it became scarce. The Korean practice of eating dog meat is said to have originated in the Stone Age, when (as in Manchuria) dog meat was a staple during the cold winter months. As Korea developed into an agricultural country, dogs continued to be regarded more as barnyard animals than pets - and since dogs were much less useful in the rice fields than oxen, they were ultimately regarded as a handy source of meat. Wall paintings in a fourth-century Koguryo Kingdom tomb depict dogs being slaughtered along with pigs and sheep. The Sino-Korean character for "fair and proper", "yeon", literally translates into "as cooked dog meat is delicious". Ancient Korean medical texts point out the dietary similarities between dogs and humans, and recommend dog meat to fortify the spirit, warm the body and aid recovery from illness.

But these ancient texts make no mention of the virility-enhancing qualities of dog meat. Using dog meat stew as an aphrodisiac is generally considered a 20th-century fad. It's especially popular during Sambok, a 30-day period on the lunar calendar when the summer heat is believed to deplete one's sexual energy. During this time of year, back-alley boshin-tang restaurants are usually packed with loud groups of men. The macho, backslapping, joke-filled mood of such gatherings is a bit like British men visiting the local strip club on payday.

It is under this guise of male bonding that Jemin tries to salvage the situation when he reveals to me that I am eating dog meat stew.

"Boshin-tang is a very useful food," he says, striking a mock Superman pose. "All of your girlfriends will be very happy."

"I doubt that," I say. "I once had a girlfriend who insisted that dogs are more trustworthy than men."

"That's just evolution. Trust is a trick that dogs play. They don't want you to know how delicious they are."

Jemin's nonchalant attitude bothers me, but I'm not sure what to say. In five years of living in Asia, I've eaten whale, silkworm larvae and deer antlers, so I can't moralise over the ethics of eating dog meat stew. Instead, I try to make Jemin understand the westerner's point of view. Citing evidence ranging from drug-sniffing German shepherds to guide dogs for the blind to America's Funniest Home Videos, I lecture him for 10 minutes on what sets dogs apart from livestock.

By the time Jemin admits I have a point, I'm on my second helping of boshin-tang.

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