[Texan5]

I like vinegar-I love just about anything else pickled and vinegar is the main ingredient in my favorite salad dressing-it is the smell of kimchee that gags me-it reminds me of rotten eggs-I don’t like that other rotten-smelling oriental “delicacy”-fish sauce-either. But I’m not put off by strong-smelling/tasting cheese-I’ve mostly lived in the country/on a ranch, where people do eat some stuff that isn’t on the menu in a city...

I grow spinach, and mostly eat it raw in salad. If I do cook it, I steam it just until it wilts-spinach cooked too long makes it icky and takes out a lot of the vitamin, too...

[COBOL2Java]

I'll bet it's the sulfur content in the cabbage. Like sauerkraut, kimchee is not cooked (which would remove the sulfur); it's made by a process called lacto-fermentation. The starches and sugars within the vegetables are converted to lactic acid by the friendly bacteria lactobacilli. In Korea, kimchi was traditionally stored underground in jars to keep cool during the summer months and unfrozen during the winter months.

Other lacto-fermented vegetables include cucumber, beets, onions, and garlic (cucumber of course, become pickles). Those vegetalbes don't have the sulfur content that is found in cabbage.