All Things Kimchi

I have been in Seoul, Korea, the past few days on a business trip, and it has been a very interesting visit. I had never been to Asia before and I am marveling at the both the amazing amount of building and growth going on here as well as at the density of the population in the very large cities like Seoul. Most of Seoul has been built since the Korean war so it is a very new city and it is rather clean and well kept. However, I am beginning to understand how food plays a bigger role in our lives than I had realized.

Kimchi is a traditional Korean food that seems to be present at every meal. While there are supposed to be over 100 kinds of kimchi, the type that seems to show up most often is best described as cabbage soaked in Tabasco sauce. That’s right. Cabbage preserved, or pickled, in hot sauce. If that weren’t enough, many of the main dishes, served with rice or noodles, are also fairly well swimming in hot sauce. I am not talking ‘Taco Bell’ hot, I am talking HOT! Many employers here provide lunch but it is one or two entrée choices plus rice, soup, and kimchi. So far the entrees and the kimchi have always been very, very spicy hot. The good news is that I am not tempted to overeat at lunch!

The people here actually seem to like this stuff. But to us Americans of tender palate, I find myself longing for a hamburger or some other American food when I eat a Korean meal. Oh, and beware anything described as ‘seafood’ on a menu. That seems to mean a mixture of a few shrimp plus a lot of things that would not show up in America. The seafood dishes I have had so far included squid (not those tiny little calamari-type squid, but big honking squid! It has the texture of boiled fire hose generally) and sea cucumber (which might be described as resembling seafood-flavored jello)along with some other things I didn’t ask anyone to identify.
Fortunately the hotel has an enormous breakfast buffet that is wonderful, so I can indulge myself at breakfast and take a banana along with me so that I can make it through lunch just sampling the offerings. This has, however, reminded me of times in the past when I had wondered about the role of food to some people. When I was growing up, for example, I recall my family and extended family reminiscing about certain foods that they had often eaten on the farm growing up and how they missed some of those: things like homemade sausages or my grandmother’s buttermilk biscuits. Those were familiar foods, though, so I could relate. Then when we lived in Massachusetts, one of the men I worked with was from Nigeria. Every month he spent a weekend going to New York city to visit ethnic markets to get African foods that were not available in Pittsfield, MA. Now, I had tasted some of the stuff he brought for lunch and while it was not kimchi it was still pretty awful. Yet, as he put it, ‘I have to have my food’. Put the emphasis in that last statement on ‘my’ food. His own, native food. This was a very personal thing to him, something of utmost importance to his personal well being and happiness.

There is something about being the foreigner, the stranger that makes us ill at ease. Food, I think, drives that home more than a lot of other circumstances. Language does that as well, but here in Korea so many folks speak English that the language issues have touched me less than the food. Foreign food seems to reinforce that I am just passing through, this is not my home.
That is a good reminder for me. C.S. Lewis pointed out, along with many others including the apostle Paul, that God never intended for us to get too comfortable in this world. That ‘settled comfortableness’ ,as Lewis called it, is what we try to achieve here but we will not achieve that until we reach our true home. He never intended us to. Being in a foreign land rather reminds me of that.

As the old hymn says, ‘This world is not my home, I’m just a passin’ through…’; I’m just hoping that we can skip the kimchi in heaven!