SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — A rural South Korean town is getting roasted over its video ad on garlic that some farmers say stinks of obscenity and has even sexually objectified the agricultural product.
The controversy surrounds a 30-second video that had been posted on a YouTube channel for Hongseong County, a small central-west South Korean town of about 100,000 people known for its local “Hongsan” garlic, for about two years.
The video shows a woman touching the thigh of a man named “Hongsan” with a full garlic head mask and saying words like “very thick” and “hard” to apparently describe the quality of the local garlic. It’s also a parody of a famous scene from a 2004 hit Korean movie titled “Once Upon a Time in High School.”
The spicy ad, which reportedly generated about 190,000 views, had been largely kept underground, but began to take root in the larger…
