Defined by food

It must seem hardly original to suggest that a culture is defined by its food, but I can't help thinking that this is even moreso the case with Korea than with other cultures. Sure, American food suggests our emphasis on speed, quantity, and convenience, while French cuisine suggests a love of tradition, authenticity, and long, slow meals, but for me, Korea's food was, more than anything else, the key to understanding its culture.

Even though I'd eaten many Korean meals in the past, I was really struck by this fact as I sat down to eat with the gracious Ahn family in Bucheon for my first three days. Just as the heavily Confucian culture is very much structured on the individiual's place in society, so the meals are completely social, communal events. Except for individual bowls of rice or barley, everything is put in the middle and everyone eats from the same dishes with the chopsticks and spoons they've already put in their mouths. I'd always wondered about this when I'd eaten meals in Korean restaurants in the U.S.: How do Koreans serve themselves? Do they turn the chopsticks around to serve themselves, as I've seen done in Japan? Do they have more serving spoons?

Nope. There may be a jigae (stew) in the center, and maybe 6-8 panchan (sidedishes) including several types of kimchi, and everyone just digs in and takes what they want repeatedly, chopsticks and spoons flying and nearly avoiding midair collisions. I can't imagine there would be a Korean phrase for "double dipping." (Do they spread germs more easily? or does the spiciness of the kimchi keep microbes in check?)

The fact that at each meal everyone is facing each other, eating from the same dishes, throws in sharp relief the American notion that "I am an individual, and I will order what I want, the way I want." What do all the fussy people with food allergies do here? Wither away and die off? I can't imagine Koreans ordering completely separate dishes, and then wrapping up their leftovers to take home. (Though I CAN imagine them eating dinner food for breakfast.) Of course, the best way to please a Korean host, I was told, was not to leave any leftovers (but this seems a somewhat more universal attitude).

I also know that it's customary to wait for the oldest person to start eating before others may eat, which explains why my host Hongbom always addressed me first, pointing to the food and saying, "Try." At my age, a Confucian-based culture is starting to sound pretty good.

Then there's the omnipresence of kimchi--literally at every meal, and in so many forms, and combined with rice or tofu or just eaten plain. Korean families traditionally make their year's supply of cabbage kimchi in a communal event in the late fall and then bury them in the ground in dark brown earthen pots to be used throughout the year. These days Koreans (especially the millions living in all the high-rises in the Seoul area who have not even a scrap of earth to bury something in), if they make their own kimchi, store it in separate kimchi refrigerators that keep it at the optimal temperature.

Along with the rice cooker, this is another appliance one doesn't see in a typical American kitchen. That's o.k., the Ahns didn't know what a toaster was, and had a long conversation trying to figure out how they could orchestrate the complicated process of offering us toast, butter, and jam for our final breakfast there. They thought maybe they could fry the bread, but all they had was "hamburger" buns. (They do have an oven, though; but they haven't used it in four years.)

There was very little bread, but of course rice in every form. Bab, the word for rice, is also the word for food. Two traditional greetings are "Have you had rice yet?" in the morning and "Have you had lunch yet?" later in the day, both surely legacies from a history of want and deprivation. But, as in so many ways, the morning greeting has become Americanized to literally "Good morning," -- joeun achimimnida -- reflecting the new prosperity in this once suffering land.