$9 lunchbox with just kimchi?? Korean sports event lunch scandal explained

So a sports event in Chungju just went viral for the most embarrassing reason.

The 19th Chungbuk Disabled Citizens Sports Festival happened in April 2025, and they handed out lunchboxes to participants during the opening ceremony. Each box cost 12,000 won per person. That's like ~$9 USD.

What was in the box.

Perilla leaf pickles. Seasoned seaweed snacks. Kimchi. Green chili peppers.

That's it. That's the box. No protein. No actual main dish. Just... banchan. Side dishes. Floating in a container with no main character.

People started posting photos online and it BLEW UP. Comments everywhere like "wait this is supposed to be a full meal???" and "for 12,000 won I expect actual food in there."

So the city's disability sports association came out and explained themselves. Okay so apparently the contract wasn't just for food, it was a whole package deal including tents, tables, chairs, the whole setup. They picked the vendor because they were the only ones who could do all of it. And during the pre-event tasting everything was fine.

But then they had to make 1,400+ boxes on the actual day. And somewhere in the chaos the quality just... fell off. Specifically the last 60-70 boxes handed out were the worst ones.

So their position is: not every box was bad, just some of them. Mostly toward the end. And they admitted it was a logistics and quality control failure.

Then the Chungju city government's official YouTube guy, "Chungju Man" (Kim Seon-tae, a city employee who runs their weirdly popular YouTube channel), posted an apology video himself. He said, and I quote: "the lunchboxes were way too bad" and "these were guests who came to Chungju, we should've taken better care of them."

The city launched an internal audit immediately after. Investigating whether the vendor selection process was even done properly. And they promised to tighten quality controls and contract verification for all future large-scale events.

Online reaction was pretty much what you'd expect. "At minimum a 12,000 won meal should feel like a MEAL." "Chungju hosts so many events, this is disappointing." A lot of people also said the real issue isn't just this one bad box, it's about whether public money is being spent responsibly at all.

And honestly? The fact that a city government employee went on YouTube to personally say "yeah that was bad, I'm sorry" is kind of refreshing. Doesn't fix the kimchi box situation but still.