London: Reaktion Books; Chicago: Distributed by the University of Chicago Press, 2013. 237 pp. (Maps, B&W photos.) US$40.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-78023-025-2.
Food, in this book, is a lens through which the author aims to “demonstrate that the lives of contemporary Koreans, both in the North and in the South, have been largely shaped by colonialism and the Cold War” (12). Through this focus the work largely succeeds in tracing connections across 1945, particularly in echoes and continuities of wartime food management.
Chapter 1 situates the development of agriculture and food industries of the colonial period in the context of Japanese imperial policy. The relatively well-known story of the chapter is of rice. By the 1930s, Korea and Taiwan together supplied almost all of Japanese rice imports, with attendant stresses on their own internal consumption. This flow of staple grain was part of a policy of “food autarky,” launched with the historical example of food’s role in Germany’s 1918 wartime collapse firmly in mind (20). Yet the sharpest focus of chapter 1 is on Korea not only as a “breadbasket” of the colonial metropole, but also as a “stockroom” for Japanese military expansion in Asia (17). By the 1930s, this had spurred the rise of processed and preserved food industries on the peninsula, producing beer, bread, confections, and canned beef, fish and crab—with the last a leading Korean export to the world as a whole in the prewar years. Chapter 2 then examines the colonial modern practice of dining out in Seoul. Cwiertka surveys the restaurant scene, but fixes on the department store as a key site at which the colonial culture of consumption, including of food, was produced and debated. Contrary to some received wisdom, she notes that Seoul’s department stores were “60–70 percent dependent on their Korean clientele” (51). In particular, department store restaurants were patronized by female diners in a way that other establishments were not, and as a result were also a recurrent topic of discourses of moral panic about women’s consumption and public behaviour.
Industrial soy sauce, the central focus of chapter 3, presents the first occasion for the book to look directly at the “multiple connections between the colonial period and the post-1945 dietary developments on the peninsula” (58). Yet precisely because of the complexity of these connections, the account of causality that it sets out is not fully satisfying. It is initially clear that, in parallel with the development of processed foods, the industrial production of synthetic soy sauce utilizing hydrolyzed vegetable protein (HVP) accelerated in the late 1930s in response to wartime supply needs, somewhat supplanting traditional production through fermentation. Nonetheless, Cwiertka estimates that only 15 percent of Korean civilians consumed HVP soy sauce in 1942 (69). The displacements of the Korean War provided another spur to the market for the industrial product, but it was still consumed out of “necessity rather than choice” (72). How, then, did soy sauce containing HVP come to constitute 97 percent of Korean consumption in 1993 (64)? Cwiertka assigns considerable importance to embodied memory produced by the “colonization of … Korean taste” by monosodium glutamate—a co-product of synthetic soy, with similar flavour effects—during the colonial era (73). Yet the delay with which this factor acted seems to ask for further explanation, as does the simultaneous move of Japanese producers away from synthetic soy.
Chapter 4 builds more successfully on the same theme in focusing on “structural continuities” (80) linking Japanese imperial food management and rationing with management as practiced in the post-1945 occupations and during the Korean War. Food governmentality thus emerges as a crucial site of continuity across 1945, but also an important locus of distinction between emerging regimes. While in the North, “swift reintroduction” of the rationing system led to food stability and helped contribute to “popular support” for the new authorities (102), in the South rationing was reintroduced in 1946 only after a disastrous failed experiment with deregulation of food markets, spurring a general decline in nutrition. Cwiertka touches also in this chapter on other significant elements and legacies of the post-Liberation food situation: on hunger as a pervasive social memory of the era, and on the Japanese processed food industry as central to the system of combat rations developed for US and ROK militaries in the Korean War.
The final two chapters examine the development of contemporary cuisine in the South and North, respectively, with continual attention to wartime legacies and political economy. In the South, for instance, ramyŏn and other wheat noodle dishes rose to popularity conditioned by government controls over rice consumption and cheap US wheat exports. Chapter 5 also offers an overview of the development of the contemporary restaurant scene, as well as the “commodification of tradition” (135) that has brought kimch’i, makkŏlli, and other foods to new national and international prominence, sometimes with attendant conflicts. Chapter 6 begins with a glance at P’yŏngyang’s new fast food restaurants and other recent culinary fads—indexes of North Korea’s partial embrace of a market economy. Their counterpoint, however, is the North Korean famine of the 1990s, of which Cwiertka offers an admirably balanced view. Although sometimes blamed for exacerbating the famine’s effects, it is also plausible that the North Korean Public Distribution System for food alleviated some of its impact (148, 152). Yet it is likewise clear that centralization of collective agriculture in the 1970s, and a concomitant increased reliance on monocropping and chemical inputs, made North Korean food production “increasingly vulnerable to external shocks” (156) and helped set the stage for the tragedy.
There are other books, written and to be written, about Korean food. Cwiertka devotes little attention to the long-term historical sedimentation of Korean dietary practice, and the contemporary cultural politics of food, while touched on, warrants further examination. Yet the focus of this work on twentieth-century political economy is basic for understanding the present, and underscores the considerable importance of this book. With its brevity and host of engaging examples, it is likely also to see classroom use—it does indeed make the mobilization economies of modern Korea, not the friendliest of topics for many students, more palatable.
Robert Oppenheim
University of Texas, Austin, USA
pp. 166-168