This is a very long essay, but so well written. Food and what it all represents to the pride of nations. It's Ligaya Mishan's 'When a Country’s Cuisine Becomes a Cultural Export' — South Korea has sought to protect and enshrine its national dishes — while also sharing its wonders with the world, published in The New York Times Style Magazine on October 12, 2022.
I don't know that much about Korean food, but I have some favourites from its various repertoire; although not its jigae-anything or jjajangmyeon or jjamppong. Having eaten 'Korean food' in South Korea and the US, and living in Singapore have exposed me to what people think is popular in this geographical location and what the Korean entrepreneurs and chefs think it's possible to export to a certain region. Certainly watching all those Korean docs-films on food and chefs (not K-drama Jewel in the Palace things) help with background knowledge of more Korean food that I would have been exposed to.
I have no love for kimchi or gochuchang. To that, I'm not keen on any type of dishes that involve a heavy-handed use of it. Of course I'm not interested in Korean fried chicken, ginseng chicken soup, and the sorts. But there's a whole plethora of other Korean food, especially its heritage royal court cuisine. Those, and temple dishes are gorgeous.
Nor is there room to acknowledge that food origins are often mythic and murky. Over the millenniums, culinary traditions have crossed borders and changed hands, been adapted and made new. Rice porridge is juk to both the Koreans and the Cantonese, and records of its consumption in China go back more than 2,000 years: Writings compiled by followers of the fourth-century B.C. Confucian philosopher Mengzi (known in the West by his Latinized name, Mencius) mention the eating of porridge as essential to mourning rites, “binding on all, from the sovereign to the mass of the people.” To the Tamils, it was kanji, “boilings,” the liquid left over from cooking rice, made into a drink or gruel (or both at once), as documented in the first century by the Roman historian Pliny the Elder; the 16th-century Sephardic Jewish physician Garcia de Orta, who studied Indian medicine in Goa, rendered the word as “canje,” which eventually evolved into “congee,” the term that now holds sway in the Western world, so much so that even in Hong Kong, Chinese restaurants that specialize in juk are called congee houses.
We can't help but smile wryly at the food 'fights' and fierce debates between Singapore and Malaysia when it comes to claiming 'national dishes'. We share a similar history and heritage as part of the Straits Settlements and Malay before we split into two independent nations. We might be able to put a claim on chicken rice and fishhead curry, but no way we can claim laksa or nasi lemak, prata or pisang goreng. How do we even fight about chilli crab and char kway teow and Hokkien mee? We can't quite argue our way through to owning Peranakan culture either. Our heritage is made up of migrant culture. Isn't it obvious?
We don't actually have a proud Singapore dish, do we? At least I can't think of any. I never look for 'Singapore food' overseas. I always end up in Malaysian restaurants. Their sambal belado or sambal belachan is always shiok. Hahahaha. It's probably like how I keep looking for spices during winter, and how on long trips, I always seek out Thai restaurants even if they're middling. I can't deal with Sichuan food or its peppercorn or those numbing peppers. But I love chillies.
Essentially, these function as intellectual property protections and constitute a legal form of preventing what we might call (loaded phrase) cultural appropriation. Since food traditions are constantly evolving, some scoff at the notion that any culture could claim to own an ingredient or a culinary custom — and that outsiders co-opting and possibly misrepresenting such could be considered theft — yet here is a legal system that supports exactly this. In the case of feta, the impact goes beyond the symbolic: Exports of the cheese, which has been made in Greece for 6,000 years (take that, Denmark) from the milk of sheep grazing on wild mountain flora, were tallied at over $400 million in 2020 and accounted for around one-tenth of the country’s food exports. Which means Danish pseudo-feta isn’t just an annoyance; it could undermine sales of and trust in Greek feta and harm the Greek economy.
Well, gimbap is not sushi... It's closer to a California roll/maki. And that isn't sushi or onigiri either. How close is it to a Chinese rice ball (fan4 tuan2) when the latter doesn't have seaweed in there? But these all fill my stomach when I'm hungry on an ass-freezing winter night. I'm not even going to go into the similarities of Korean and Chinese history or its earlier Han script before Korean hangul came about. China is touchy; I dunno if South Korea is less so.
The current wave of popularity of Korean films and Netflix dramas, as well as its K-Pop superstars are all help to also shift people's focus to Korean food. What are they eating? What are they adding to their kitchen pantries? What is nice? What's their comfort food? South Korea has got some beautiful coastal regions and islands. Those help to satisfy wanderlust and curiosity about local ingredients, farm-to-table chefs and menus. "Gastrodiplomacy"? There we go.
Such common roots do not prevent latter-day skirmishes over who owns what. Last year, South Korea’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism requested that the Chinese call kimchi by a new name, xinqi (chosen more for sound than meaning; the syllables, independently, mean “pungent” and “peculiar”), rather than lumping it together with pao cai, Sichuan fermented vegetables. Certainly, the recipes are distinct — subsuming them into one category would be like classifying kimchi as a variation on sauerkraut — but the nomenclature appears to have simply sown confusion and become a proxy for tensions between the countries. Meanwhile, within China, pao cai itself is subject to questions of authenticity: As the British cookbook author Fuchsia Dunlop writes in “The Food of Sichuan” (2019), some Sichuanese go so far as to mandate that the salt used for the brine be harvested from the wells of the town of Zigong, itself a UNESCO-recognized site of international geological significance.
We also have a food hall, a first 'hawker center' recently opened in New York City. Many went on and on about the prices. I'm like, STOP COMPARING. They would of course charge reasonable Manhattan prices for these foods. Obviously you wouldn't eat there if you're just visiting for under two weeks. Unless you're curious, then pay the city's prices for quality ingredients not found in the region, and fair wages. If we calculate the ingredients and effort that go into making these dishes, they're all worth their weight in USD.
Didn't Singapore insist on adding our hawker culture to the Unesco 'Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity' in 2020? I'm all for the idea, if it means I'll still get the taste the flavors of my childhood in my golden years. I feel that as the years go by and the hawkers aged and retire, it's getting harder to hunt down the exact flavors I remember.
Nations clamor to have their riches enter the pantheon of UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity — what belongs, at least theoretically, to all of us. But the very existence of nations, of ever-shifting borders and the still starkly real threat of invasion and subjugation, be it by military or economic might, belies this utopian ideal. So we look to our defenses. We say, “Ours, not yours.”
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