Web Excursions 2022-10-16
When a Country’s Cuisine Becomes a Cultural Export
“WE GOT STRAWBERRY, ginseng, love that kimchi,” the Wonder Girls, a now disbanded K-pop group, half-sing, half-cheer on their 2011 single “K-Food Party.”
This was hardly a spontaneous ode to the ingredients and dishes of their motherland;
South Korea’s Ministry for Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries had recruited the young women as global ambassadors,
part of a government-sponsored campaign announced three years before with the mission of elevating Korean food to the highest ranks of the world’s favorite cuisines.
How exactly this would be measured was unclear.
Proposed benchmarks — to be achieved by 2017 — included quadrupling the number of Korean restaurants overseas,
with those already existing to be sent a recipe manual encouraging standardization of Korean food name spellings (e.g., “kimchi” versus “kimchee” versus “gimchi”),
the easier for befuddled foreigners to remember.
four times as many Korean restaurants merited inclusion in the Michelin Guide to New York in 2022 compared to 2006,
with a median meal price of $63, just a dollar less than at French restaurants.
This puts them at “the top of the hierarchy of taste,”
SOUTH KOREA WAS not the first to deploy what has become known as gastrodiplomacy
(although “gastrowarfare” might be a better term here, given the country’s apparent end goal of surpassing and eclipsing other cuisines).
Thailand in the 1990s and early 2000s [was]
This is all in service of advancing a “nation brand,”
a concept formally developed by the British marketing consultant and independent policy adviser Simon Anholt in 1996 and now codified in the annual Anholt-Ipsos Nation Brands Index,
which measures reputation, judged in part by how a sampling of people around the world perceive the value of each country’s heritage and culture and how willing they are to buy its products.
In 2021, Germany, Canada and Japan led the list, while South Korea was No. 23 out of 60, ahead of China and India — an improvement on its poor showing near the bottom of the inaugural index of 2005, which analysts attributed to people confusing it “with its northern neighbor.”
But a nation’s brand — which Anholt has argued cannot be cultivated through advertising, only genuinely earned through policies and actions —
may matter more at home, which is to say, not to outsiders
but to those who identify with that nation and whose identification and loyalty grow stronger the more established the brand is in the world.
A nation is an intrinsically unstable construct, ever a work in progress.
How is it even to be defined: by territory, history, memory or the crumbs left on the dinner table?
The very idea of a nation as a collective with a shared commitment to something recognizable as a way of life is quite modern,
distinct from the long tradition of dynastic regimes in which the head of state was the state incarnate;
whose rulers, the Dutch sociologist Godfried van Benthem van den Bergh has written, “were not interested in the nature and composition of the people they ruled”
and viewed their subjects solely “as food producers, as taxpayers and as a reservoir of soldiers.”
(The Berlin-based writer and historian Thomas Meaney, in his 2020 essay “The Idea of a Nation,” coolly notes, “Literacy was necessary so citizens could, among other things, read their orders for conscription.”)
Historically, nations have been conjured out of need, solidified often in opposition —
to monarchies and colonial powers and to the encroachment of other nations, be they enemy or ally.
The American sociologist Michaela DeSoucey has framed gastronationalism as a response to globalization and the erasure of difference,
a “form of claims making,” enshrining dishes and ingredients as cultural patrimony akin to art or literature, the material turned symbolic,
more fundamental than borders on a map to a people’s sense of who they are.
At times this can be pragmatic, as with the European Union’s schema of protected designations of origin and geographical indications meant to ensure,
for example, that only Champagne from France can be sold as Champagne
(other iterations may take their own geographic name of origin, like prosecco from Italy, or settle for the generic title of “sparkling wine,” with the risk, it’s implied, that they might be closer to swill than elixir) and
that the name “feta” belongs exclusively to Greece,
despite its etymological derivation from the Italian fetta (“slice”) and complaints from Denmark,
which has produced its own briny white cheese since the 1930s, and
which this past July was determined by an E.U. court to have “failed to fulfill its obligations” as a member state by exporting that cheese under the label “feta.”
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.
Still, the symbolic portent of declaring food a national treasure may be just as powerful.
rice shortages persisted in the shattering wake of the Korean War through the 1950s and ’60s,
prompting the government to restrict rice consumption.
Starting in 1962, food vendors could only serve rice diluted with other grains and,
from 1969 to 1977, restaurants were banned from selling rice (and citizens discouraged from eating it) at lunchtime on Wednesdays and Saturdays, so-called bunsik — literally, “food made from flour” — days.
(Today bunsik is a general term for affordable snacks, like battered, deep-fried hot dogs.)
Nutritionists under the aegis of the government urged a more Western diet revolving around bread and meat,
signaling an embrace of the West as a model for modernity and growth.
This prompted a backlash from intellectuals,
who in the 1980s began to champion indigenous ingredients and traditional cooking techniques.
The West did not know best, they insisted, proclaiming in defiant counterpoint the slogan “Ours Is Good.”
Two decades later, with industrialization achieved and the economy aroar,
the South Korean government was ready to take back the narrative from the West and assert Korea’s influence in the form of soft power, persuading via cultural infiltration.
“OURS IS GOOD,” but what is ours?
How popular does a dish have to be, and for how long, to rise to the stature of national cuisine?
“the foods of a country do not, by themselves, compose a cuisine”;
if a national cuisine must be systematized, it will necessarily be shaped by the perspective of people “whose knowledge, taste and means transcend locality” —
that is, the privileged, who, free of particular regional allegiances, are able to eat widely enough to perceive (and see the advantage of perceiving) a nation’s multiple food traditions as a singular cuisine.
Consider tequila in Mexico and foie gras in France,
both endowed with long histories but neither forced to bear the freight of cultural identity until industrialization transformed them —
tequila in the late 19th century and foie gras more recently, in the 1960s and ’70s —
from local, small-batch specialties made at family-run distilleries and farms into mass-produced commodities.
The idea of a national cuisine is superfluous if one doesn’t think of oneself as a member of a nation,
with a vested interest in and even an obligation to know and declare solidarity with how our fellows across the land choose to live.
Food can be a useful political tool to set a nation on a particular path, as witnessed in Thailand in 1939,
when Field Marshal Phibun Songkhram, prime minister in name but effectively the country’s dictator — with the once all-powerful monarchy demoted to constitutional (and largely ornamental) status —
imposed on the populace a heretofore unknown, or at least unheralded, national dish:
pad Thai, rice noodles wok-fried with fish sauce and tamarind paste gone caramelized, dried shrimp in tight whorls, squiggles of eggs, furnace-worthy chiles, chives and crushed peanuts.
This abundance of ingredients was supposedly an attempt to increase domestic spending and bolster growth.
The recipe was disseminated and street vendors were deputized to sell it.
Now, less than a century into its existence, it is the Thai dish best known outside of Thailand.
According to South Korea’s 2007 Food Industry Promotion Act,
“traditional Korean cuisine” is defined as food “produced, processed and cooked
according to the Korean traditional recipes
using Korean agricultural and fishery products as main raw materials or ingredients.”
But which recipes? All of them?
some skeptics have asked, is Important Intangible Cultural Property No. 38 truly representative of the cuisine served to the Joseon court over the centuries?
Heritage, as define[d] it in “Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums and Heritage” (1998),
is “the transvaluation of the obsolete, the mistaken, the outmoded, the dead and the defunct.”
Although heritage draws on the past, it is rooted in the present and is, almost counterintuitively, something new, created in conversation with what is old.
“The past continues to speak to us,”
the British Jamaican sociologist Stuart Hall writes in his 1989 essay “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.”
“But it no longer addresses us as a simple, factual ‘past.’ … It is always constructed through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth.”
At first, the revival of Korean royal cuisine was largely confined to the academic sphere.
In the 1980s, only a few restaurants ventured to serve it, a number of them run by members of Hwang’s family.
Then, in 2003, half the country tuned in to the historical TV drama “Jewel in the Palace,”
about a 16th-century woman who becomes the king’s chef and personal physician
(food, in Korean thinking, is also medicine).
The past was remade, and suddenly royal cuisine was all the rage, not only in Korea but throughout Asia.
Perhaps emboldened by this success, as well as buoyed by the global Korean food campaign,
in 2009 the South Korean government nominated Important Intangible Cultural Property No. 38 for UNESCO’s own heritage list.
the culinary relationship between the king at court and the peasant in the village was less a matter of difference than of degree.
no foods were off limits to commoners
(although they were less likely to eat beef, since they needed cows to till the fields).
“Eating royal was not forbidden, just difficult to achieve,”
UNESCO WANTED CONTINUITY, but that’s a mirage.
Cultural identity “is not once and for all,”
“It is not a fixed origin to which we can make some final and absolute return.”
This is the problem with nation branding.
It doesn’t much allow for nuance — for bubbly K-pop to emerge from the same context that gave the world pansori (Important Intangible Cultural Property No. 5), epic chants sung so gutturally, so deeply excavated from the throat, that performers in training sometimes spit blood;
for Korean food to be brazen and discreet and all the shades in between, from Korean barbecue on a tabletop grill, smoke barreling through the room, descending, possessing, writing itself into the seams of your clothes, to the daintiest cup of barley tea that almost tastes like nothing, until you pay attention.
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.
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.
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.”