New blog: Korean vending machines: pork belly, dried flowers and foreign subway tickets

Vending machines, if you ask me, provide a window on a country’s cultural priorities. They ensure, after all, access to goods which are deemed to be so vital that they should be available around the clock, everyday of the year. They are indeed my favorite machines, especially the mechanic ones that use a coin to trigger a mechanical “domino effect” to release the product, or, at the University of Groningen, the ones using rotating spiral dispensers to push a snack “over the edge” to crash into a tray (which, in turn, when opened blocks access to the rows of snacks yet to be dispensed). Read more