Food in Asia and the Pacific. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015. xi, 138 pp., [8] pp. of plates. (Colored illustrations.) US$39.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-3935-2.
Upon receiving this volume, I was unsure of what to expect. The title implied, at least to this reader, that the work would centre on Korean cuisine in the US; however, the subtitle also brought to the fore the ubiquitous buzz word of “authenticity” that seems to pop up everywhere in present scholarly literature. Nonetheless, having written a good deal on the history of Korean food, I was happy to have the opportunity to read something cast in a different light, on a cuisine that my own experiences indicate is at times quite different than what we might find in Korea.
This small volume—less than 140 pages—focuses on just four main dishes as served in primarily four disparate regions of the US. Ryang comments on naengmyŏn in Los Angeles, chŏn in Baltimore, kalbi in Hawaii, and pibimbap in Iowa City. At first glance, my thought was that one would be hard pressed to find four more distinct areas of the US, or, for that matter, four more dissimilar foods. The randomness did have a common thread, though, that being that the author had lived in/researched/visited these spots at some point in her academic career.
Each chapter begins with a brief description of the area, its demographic characteristics and the history of the Korean population residing therein. This I found informative for setting the backdrop. The chapters then follow a pattern of Ryang’s experience with a particular food in that locale and her own experiences or memories of the food elsewhere. There is some historical discussion on the food’s place in Korean history (however, as will be discussed below, this is clearly not the author’s strength), how the local rendition might vary, and then some larger implications about cross-cultural currents that might be drawn from the various developments in the food’s trajectory over both spatial and temporal boundaries.
Ryang’s narrative tends to stray from her discussion at times and brings various episodes relating to her travels into the volume. Thus we learn of her bus commute to the Koreatown in Los Angeles, during which a male bus rider exposed his genitals, her first weeks in Baltimore, and her purchase of, evidently, delicious lilikoi (Hawaiian passionfruit) bread on Hawaii’s Big Island. It is a narrative style that not all readers will appreciate; in this reader’s opinion it detracts from the more consequential aspects of the book and takes away from the focus of her study.
Ryang’s conclusions are sometimes stimulating. While I find the question of “authenticity” to be entirely moot, she does ask the right questions, such as: “Did authentic naengmyeon even exist in the first place?” (107). Frankly, it does not matter and nor does the question of the authority to declare a particular food authentic or take ownership of a tradition. Ryang gives the perfect example concerning the South Korean government’s various attempts to “claim the right to determine the authenticity of kimchi” (2, 100–111, 119). Korean cuisine, like all cuisines, has always been in a state of flux and foods have changed greatly over time. Her final arguments concerning the relationship of global capitalism, authenticity, and food are excellent and clearly demonstrate the role of global capitalism in taking “a basic element for the preservation of human life” (120) and using that for profit-making, consequences be damned. This is indeed tragic.
While I was initially not enamoured with the randomness of place and food, as I read through the volume Ryang’s approach grew on me and became more apparent. The connection between places and foods mirrors in many ways the randomness of the development of Korean cuisine over the centuries. Who knows what forces led to garlic making its way from Southeast Asia to the Korean Peninsula, or why chili peppers became so prominent in Korean food after their introduction in the early seventeenth century? Why did Korean, Chinese, and Japanese cuisines develop so differently, despite a great overlap in ingredients and shared knowledge between these cultures? The reason is significantly less important than the result, and this is the same bond I found between Los Angeles, Baltimore, Hawaii, and Iowa City, and the foods described in the volume. The same processes—human movement, cultural adaptation and assimilation, and innovation—that have shaped Korean food in Korea are in play in the US.
The volume would have benefitted, like so many others nowadays, from a better understanding of history. While I understand this is not the focus of the work, there are some rather glaring misunderstandings. For example, Ryang states that rice was the primary source of carbohydrates in premodern Korea (11). This is not the case, however, as most commoners could only afford to eat rice a few times a year; instead, they ate other grains such as millet and barley. She also questions whether one could find a “science of Korean food” (10) in past times. Indeed, we can find numerous works that link various foods to maintaining health and curing disease, the most prominent being the Tongŭi pogam (Exemplar of Eastern Medicine) compiled in the mid-Chosŏn period. The chung’in were not artisans and craftsmen (12), but rather the technocrats of the Chosŏn bureaucracy and served as physicians, accountants, astronomers, jurists, and translators. Like Japan (68), butchers were looked down upon in Chosŏn Korea and considered as part of the outcast group known as the paekchŏng. There are other such examples, but I suppose these are probably minor flaws, if not completely undetectable to readers interested in modern-day Korean foods in the US.
In closing, this is an interesting book and when one considers Ryang’s main argument concerning the flow of food caused by the wars of the past century, immigration and capitalism, it is a compelling work that adds significantly to the discourse on “national” foods in contemporary society.
Michael J. Pettid
Binghamton University, Binghamton, USA
pp. 679-681