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Food Matters
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.
To accompany this story, the chef Andrew Choi of the New York restaurant Onjium at Genesis House created dishes representative of Korean royal cuisine, all served atop a custom-made traditional Korean hanbok. Here: saseuljeok — literally, “grilled chain skewers” — made with alternating pieces of American Wagyu beef and line-caught tilefish, with char-grilled zucchini and a salad of scallions, lettuce, anise hyssop and herbs. Credit... Photograph by David Chow. Prop styling by Leilin Lopez-Toledo. Costume design by Stephanie Kim
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By Ligaya Mishan
Photographs by David Chow
- Oct. 12, 2022
“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 .” “Keep the skin so beautiful and full of energy.” 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.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the forthright English lyrics (“For me to stay fly, I gots to eat good”), the Wonder Girls’ song was not a hit. But the number of Korean restaurants overseas did increase exponentially, from 9,253 in 2009 to 33,499 — just slightly shy of the target — in 2017, with a clientele that was more than three-quarters non-Korean, as reported by the Korean Food Promotion Institute. In the United States alone, there are now anywhere from 2,000 to 7,000 Korean restaurants (the higher estimate comes from the marketing research firm IbisWorld) and, according to data analyzed by the New York University food studies scholar Krishnendu Ray, 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,” Ray writes — although still far below Japanese sushi (median meal price: $235).
But what is the point of the South Korean government actively promoting Korean food to other countries, beyond the obvious: boosting agricultural exports and enticing tourists to come sample dishes in their place of origin? How does it profit the Korean nation — materially, psychologically, spiritually — if more non-Koreans learn to love kimchi?
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). In the 1990s and early 2000s, Thailand started coaxing native chefs to open businesses outside the country with the help of loans from the state-owned Export-Import Bank and, since 2006, the Ministry of Commerce has issued Thai Select certificates to restaurants high and low around the world “to guarantee the authentic Thai taste,” with awardees ranging from the Orchid House mini-chain in Lagos, Nigeria, where diners may lounge on velvety sofas beneath hanging ferns, to the more utilitarian Krua Thai in Reykjavík, Iceland, which maintains a wall of neon Post-it reviews scrawled by customers. The vetting process includes a surprise visit by a representative of the Thai government to test the restaurant’s food.
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. For 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.”)
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