“WE GOT STAWBERRY, Ginseng, royal cuisine Love That Kimchi” The Wonder Girls, now disbanded K-pop band, sang the song “K-Food Party” in Korean. It was part of a three-year-old government-sponsored campaign that had seen the women recruited as global ambassadors by South Korea’s Ministry of Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. This campaign was designed to elevate Korean food to the top of the most popular cuisines.

Royal cuisine:Korean food

It was not clear how this would be measured. The proposed benchmarks, which were to be reached by 2017, included quadrupling the number Korean restaurants abroad, with those that already exist to receive a recipe manual encouraging standardization in Korean food names spellings (e.g. “kimchi” instead of “kimchee”), making it easier for foreigners to remember.

The song by Wonder Girls was not a big hit despite or maybe because of its clear English lyrics (“For my to stay fly, i gots to eat well”) The number of Korean restaurants abroad increased exponentially from 9,253 in 2009, to 33,499 in 2017, just slightly short of the target.

Royal cuisine:Food Promotion Institute

According to the Korean Food Promotion Institute, the clientele was more than three quarters non-Korean. There are 2,000 to 7,000 Korean restaurants in America (the higher estimate is from IbisWorld). Krishnendu Ray, a New York University food studies scholar, found that there were four times as many Korean restaurants in New York City in 2022 than in 2006.

The median meal cost was $63, which is just one dollar more than French restaurants. Ray says this puts them at the “top of the hierarchy of flavor” but they are still well below Japanese sushi (median dinner price: $235).

What is the point of South Korea’s government actively promoting Korean food in other countries beyond what seems obvious, such as boosting agricultural exports or inviting tourists to try dishes from their home country? If more non-Koreans love kimchi, how does this benefit the Korean nation?

SOUTH KOREA was not the first country to use what is now known as gastrodiplomacy. However, “gastrowarfare”, given the country’s stated goal of eclipsing all other cuisines, might be a better name. Thailand began encouraging native chefs to open their own businesses in the 1990s and 2000s with loans from the Export-Import Bank.

Since 2006, the Ministry of Commerce issued Thai Select certificates to restaurants all over the globe “to guarantee the authentic Thai flavor.”

The recipients range from the Orchid House mini-chain, Lagos, Nigeria, where diners can lounge on velvety couches under hanging ferns to the more practical Krua Thai in Reykjavik (Iceland), which has a wall of Post-it reviews written by customers. A representative from Thailand visits the restaurant to inspect its food.

All of this is in the service of “nation branding,” which was originally developed by Simon Anholt, a British marketing consultant and independent adviser to policy.

Royal cuisine: Anholt-Ipsos Nation Brands

It is now codified in Anholt-Ipsos Nation Brands Index. This index measures reputation by assessing how people perceive each country’s culture and heritage, and whether they are willing to purchase its products.

The list was led by Japan, Canada, and Germany in 2021. South Korea was at No. 23 of 60, ahead China and India — a significant improvement over its poor performance near the bottom in the inaugural index. Analysts attribute this to people mistaking it for its northern neighbor.

Anholt argued that a nation’s brand cannot be built through advertising. It must be earned through policies, actions, and internal communications. This means that it may matter more in your own country, and not just to outsiders.

A nation is an inherently unstable construct that is always evolving. What is the best way to define it? History, geography, memory, or what’s left of the dinner table? The idea of a nation is a collective that shares a commitment to a common way of living is very modern.

This is in contrast to the long history of dynastic regimes where the head of state was the ruler of the state. (The essay by Thomas Meaney, a Berlin-based historian and writer, “The Idea of A Nation,” in 2020, coolly states that “Literacy was necessary for citizens to read their conscription orders.

Royal cuisine:Nationalism

Nationalism has been a historical phenomenon. They have been created out of necessity and consolidated often in opposition to monarchies and colonial power and the encroachment by other nations, whether they be enemy or allies.

American sociologist Michaela DeSoucey explains gastronationalism as an attempt to counter globalization and the erasure or difference. She describes it as “form of claims making” that enshrines dishes and ingredients as cultural heritage.

The material becomes more fundamental than borders on maps to people’s senses of who they are. Sometimes this is pragmatic. For example, the European Union’s scheme of protected designations and geographic indications meant to make sure that Champagne only comes from France.

Other iterations, such as prosecco from Italy or prosecco from Italy may use their own geographical names of origin. The name “feta” was chosen to represent Greece.

Royal cuisine:Italian fetta

This is despite the fact that it derives its name from the Italian fetta (“slice”), and complaints from Denmark which, this July, determined that it belonged to the E. Court ruled that the export of this cheese under the “feta” label violated its obligations as a member country.

These are intellectual property protections that prevent cultural appropriation. Some people are sceptical about the idea that any culture could claim an ingredient or culinary tradition. It is possible that someone outsiders could co-opt and misrepresent such items as theft.

However, there is a legal system that supports this. The impact of feta goes beyond the symbolic. In 2020, exports of the cheese, made from milk of sheep that graze on wild mountain flora, amounted to over $400 million and represented around one-tenth the country’s food exports.

Royal cuisine:Danish pseudofeta

Danish pseudofeta is not just annoying, it could also affect sales and trust in Greekfeta and damage the Greek economy.

The symbolic power of declaring food a national heritage may still be as strong. Kwang Ok Kim, a Korean anthropologist, has documented that rice shortages continued in the wake of the Korean War, which lasted from the 1950s to the 1960s. This led to restrictions on rice consumption. From 1962, food vendors were restricted from selling rice dilute with other grains.

Restaurants were also forbidden from selling rice at lunchtime on Wednesdays or Saturdays. This was the so-called “bunsik” days. Bunsik today is an umbrella term that refers to affordable snacks like deep-fried, battered hot dogs.

Under the auspices of the government, nutritionists advocated a Western-style diet that included bread and meat. This was a sign of an acceptance of the West as a model of modernity and growth.

Royal cuisine:Intellectuals

Intellectuals reacted and began to promote traditional cooking methods and indigenous ingredients in the 1980s. They insisted that the West didn’t know best and proclaimed in defiant opposition the slogan “Ours is Good.” Two decades later, South Korea was ready to reclaim the West’s narrative and assert its influence through soft power and cultural infiltration.

This was just a jockeying for position at international trade, or the next stage of nation building. Did the audience consist of the entire world or just its own people?

Royal cuisine:OURS IS GOOD

“OURS IS GOOD” but what is ours? What is the minimum popularity and time it takes for a dish to become a national culinary icon? The French word for baguette was not first recorded in French until the 1920s. Sidney W. Mintz (American anthropologist) says that “tasting food, tasting freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture and The Past” (1996) does not consider the category a “holistic artifice”.

Foie gras in France and Tequila in Mexico have long histories, but they are not subject to the burden of cultural identity. In fact, tequila was produced at small-batch distilleries and farms and became mass-produced commodities in the 1960s and 1970s.

If one does not consider himself a member of the nation and have a vested interest and obligation to learn and support how others live, then the idea of a national food is unnecessary.

A nation’s food can serve as a political tool

A nation’s food can serve as a political tool. This was demonstrated in Thailand in 1939 when Field Marshal Phibun Songkhram became the prime minister but in reality the dictator.

The once-all-powerful monarchy was reduced to constitutional status. He then imposed upon the population a new national dish, pad Thai. Pad Thai is rice noodles stir-fried with fish sauce, tamarind paste, caramelized dried shrimp, eggs, chives, and furnace-worthy chiles.

The abundance of ingredients was apparently a way to boost domestic spending and growth. Street vendors were assigned to sell the recipe after it was circulated.

It is now the most well-known Thai dish outside of Thailand, having been around for less than 100 years.

South Korea’s Food

According to South Korea’s Food Industry Promotion Act 2007, “traditional Korean Cuisine” means food that is “produced, processed, and cooked according to traditional Korean recipes using Korean agricultural or fishery products as main ingredients or raw materials.

” But what recipes? They all? Katarzyna J. Cwiertka, a Polish East Asian Studies scholar, observed that three government-sponsored websites published divergent lists of Korean essential dishes at one time during the Korean food campaign.

Even though the Korean product criteria would seem to exclude Korean restaurants from countries that do not have them, chefs and home cooks can still be disqualified by using shortcuts or inventing new recipes. How faithful must one be to tradition?

A nation is an inherently unstable construct that is always in process. What is the best way to define it? By territory, history, or what’s left of the dinner table?

IMPORTANT INTANGIBLE CUTURAL Property No. 38

• IMPORTANT INTANGIBLE CUTURAL Property No. 38, according to the Korean government’s archive protected heritage, could refer to a bowl of porridge or porridge with chicken broth and rice. It is a mild dish that is easy on the stomach and digestive system.
•  It could also be kong-guksu which is a dish of noodles boiled in soy milk. This dish is calm and pale. Tangpyeong Chae is a slippery mixture of mung bean jelly, vegetables in Korea’s five cardinal colours.
• It is a dish King Yeongjo is believed to have served to rival factions in 18th-century Korea as a vision and warning to all to find harmony. These foods form part of the Joseon dynasty’s royal cuisine.
• This line lasted from 1392 until the death of the last childless king in 1926. His reign had already ended 16 years earlier when Japan annexed the Korean Peninsula.
• South Korea’s Cultural Property Preservation Act of 2012 was South Korea’s first legislation to include food. It took place alongside other customs like bongsan, which is a dance-drama that features exaggerated masks and makes a mockery of the ruling class, and Gannil, which is the art of making broad-rimmed horsehair caps.
• This process is so complicated that it takes three master artisans to make each piece. Hwang Hye Seong, a Korean anthropologist, was almost the sole person to bring food into South Korea’s Cultural Property Preservation Act of 1962.
• She sought out the only surviving royal chef and recorded her memories of rituals and recipes that could have been lost from the Earth in 1943. Some skeptics wonder if Important Intangible Cultural Property No. 38 are representative of the Joseon court’s cuisine over the centuries.
• Hwang was 13 years old when she joined the palace’s service in 1901. By the time she reached the role of serving court meals, the Japanese had already entered the scene, and Hwang was witness to the final breaths and enervated gestures of a fallen kingdom.
• The American folklorist and cultural anthropologist Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett might wonder if such a question misses the point. Heritage, as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett defines it in her 1998 book “Destination Culture.
• Tourism, Museums, Heritage.” Heritage is, in her words, “the transvaluation [of] the obsolete, the misunderstood, and the outmoded, and the dead and defunct.” Stuart Hall, a British Jamaican socioologist, wrote in 1989 that “The Past Continues to Talk to Us.
• “ He said this in “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” (1998). “But it doesn’t address us as a simple, factual past…. It is constantly constructed through memory, fantasy and narrative.
• The revival of Korean royal food was initially restricted to academic circles. Only a handful of restaurants tried to offer it in the 1980s, many of which were run by Hwang’s relatives.
• In 2003, half of the country watched the historical TV drama “Jewel in the Palace”, which was about a 16-century woman who becomes the King’s personal chef and physician (food is, in Korean thinking), It was like the past was being remade and royal cuisine became a cult in Asia.

Global Korean cuisine campaign

Possibly inspired by this success and buoyed by the global Korean cuisine campaign, the South Korean government named Important Intangible Cultural Property No. 38 to UNESCO’s heritage list.

Not only would the Koreans, but all of humanity share in the glory. France was awarded a place for “the quintessential French gastronomic meal” in the following year.

UNESCO calls it the “quintessential French gastronomic meal”, but UNESCO declined to award the same honor to Korean royal food. UNESCO stated that they needed more information to better understand how the practice is reproduced by its bearers, and provide them with a sense if continuity and identity.

Cho Eun Hee is a chef at Onjium in Seoul. It is part of an institute that studies traditional Korean culture. Cho Eun Hee studied under Hwang. She is one of only 30 Korean devotees to be honored by the government as a protector for royal cuisine.

However, her approach is one of a scholar and not of a guard who patrols the boundaries of an exclusive, exclusionary territory. She believes that the difference in culinary skills between the king and the peasant was more about degree than it was of difference.

The king would get the finest ingredients, picked at their peak, and brought to court from all regions of Korea. There, they would be prepared by chefs with decades-long training and meticulous attention to details.

Red beans and carving the bumps of a yuja

This included shucking the skins of little red beans and carving the bumps of a yuja (more commonly called outside of Korea by its Japanese nickname yuzu), sealing the peel with honey and julienne juices, and then tossing everything except the peel to make a festive rice cake.

Commoners could eat any food, although they were less likely than the king to eat beef because they had to tend the fields. Seung Hee Lee, an Atlanta-born epidemiologist who was born in Korea, says that eating royal food is not prohibited.

However, it can be difficult to do so. Everyone ate juk. “Back in those days, if your goal was to become a bride eligible, you needed to be able to make hundreds of types of porridge.”

Jiyeon Lee is a former Kpop star and has four No.1 albums. Jiyeon Lee, a former K-pop star who had four No. 1 albums, has now retired to America to run Heirloom BBQ with Cody Taylor. The menu featured four courses including juk, tangpyeong, mung bean jelly, and squid ink.

A whole duck leg was glazed seven times with gochujang, soy sauce, and a soy sauce that had been aged 10 years. Seung Hee laughs, “We wouldn’t serve meat this way if we were truly royalty.” “The king cannot be seen eating meat off of the bone. It is too wild.”

Royal cuisine

Royal cuisine is delicate. Jiyeon says such restraint is lovely. “You can taste them,” she said. Cho describes the flavors as “clean”, and “pure,” and deplores “the stereotype of Korean cuisine as spicy, salty, and forward.” Seung Hee is more direct and dismissive of the incompetence of Western sommeliers who “pigeonhole Asian food as heavily seasoned” and suggest pairings of Gewurztraminer and Riesling.

Notably, UNESCO was more open to South Korea’s next culinary request, in support of the famedly, triumphantly pungent kimchi whose preparation method was, at least as of 2013, on the Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. In a bizarre act of geopolitics, North Korea applied for and received recognition of its own kimchi traditions.

UNESCO WANTED CONTINUITY

• UNESCO WANTED CONTINUITY but that’s a dream. Hall writes that cultural identity is not a one-and-for-all thing. “It’s not a fixed origin from which we can make any final and absolute return.” This is what is wrong with nation branding.
• This doesn’t allow for much nuance. It is impossible for K-pop to emerge in the same context as pansori (Important Intangible Culture Property No. 5, epic chants so gutturally, so deeply extracted from the throat that performers in training sometimes spit out blood. 5), Korean food to be brazen, discreet, and all shades in between.
• From Korean barbecue on a tabletop, smoke barreling through your room, descending and possessing, writing itself into your clothes to the tiniest cup of barley tea that almost taste like nothing until you pay attention.
• It is important to recognize that many food origins are mythic and murky. Over the millennia, culinary traditions have changed hands and been adapted, adapted, and reinvented across borders. Rice porridge is juk for both the Cantonese and Koreans.
• Records of rice porridge consumption in China date back to more than 2000 years. Writings written by fourth-century B.C. followers. Mengzi, Confucian philosopher, is known in the West as his Latinized name Mencius.
• He mentions rice porridge being essential for mourning rituals. Garcia de Orta (16th century Sephardic Jewish physician) translated the word “canje” into “congee,” which became “congee” in the West. Congee houses are Chinese restaurants that specialize only in juk.
• These common roots don’t prevent future skirmishes about who has what. South Korea’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism asked that kimchi be renamed xinqi by the Chinese. This was to distinguish it from pao cai, Sichuan fermented vegetable, and other similar foods.
• Although the recipes are different, subsuming them in one category would be like putting kimchi into the same category as sauerkraut. However, the nomenclature seems to have created confusion and been used as a proxy for tensions among the two countries.

 Nevertheless, China’s pao cai is still in doubt

Nevertheless, China’s pao cai is still in doubt. Fuchsia Dunlop, a British cookbook author, writes that some Sichuanese have compelled the salt for the brine to be sourced from the wells of Zigong. This town is an UNESCO-recognized location of international geological significance.

Nations want their wealth to be included in the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. This is what, at most theoretically, belongs to us all.

This utopian ideal is a lie, however, because of the existence of nations and their ever-shifting borders as well as the real danger of invasion and subjugation (economic or military) that exists. We look to our defenses. We say “Ours, Not Yours.”

Leilin Lopez-Toledo specializes in prop styling. Costume design by Stephanie Kim. Joseph McHugh, senior group manager at Genesis House. Alex Lopez, photo assistant. Sunmi Yim, Costume assistant

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