Background: Over the last couple of decades, substantial research and public policy have paid attention to understanding the nature of food desert and its implications on public health consequences of disparities in access to affordable healthy foods primarily in Western countries. Although a handful of studies of food desert have been conducted in East Asia, mainly in urban space, direct application of the concept and the measures of food deserts to an East Asian context has failed to provide consistent study results. Discussion: We establish a notion of "food jungle" in an attempt to fully grasp constrained access to fresh and nutritious foods in the midst of overflowing sources of cheap unhealthy foods mixed with many grocery retailers in a highly dense urban regions in some East Asian countries. Since metropolitan areas in East Asia demonstrate different geographical features from the ones in Western countries in terms of high population density with a high number of grocery stores and other food sources clustered due to the limited size of land, it is expected that the relative inaccessibility of affordable healthy foods especially for low-income population would emerge in a different form than food deserts. In the case of South Korea, cultural value of convenience and time further constitutes "food jungle" by leading consumers including low-income households to experience limited accessibility of affordable healthy foods through justification or unawareness of the consequences of their cheap and unhealthy food choices. Summary: In the East Asian context, spatial accessibility plays a less critical role in shaping "food desert." Instead, lack of ability to make informed food choices in "food jungle" due to either insufficient knowledge on nutrition or absence of awareness of food safety issues seems to explain more about the emergence of disparities in access to healthy and affordable foods in Korea, and furthermore, in East Asian context.