Every story here is real, drawn from my life, my family, and the people and places that have shaped how I understand food and identity. If something here resonates with you and you feel inspired to share your own story, I’d love to hear from you.
This project is where my love for food stories takes shape. It didn’t begin as writing. It began at home, in conversation, and most often, with my mother.
I’ve lived in many countries and traveled through many more. My mother, on the other hand, has lived her whole life in Korea, apart from a few rare visits to see me abroad. She sees the world mostly through TV and through the stories I bring home.
One summer while visiting her, I cooked fajitas with homemade tortillas and pico de gallo. I explained that in Mexico, pico de gallo is eaten with almost every meal, just like kimchi (김치) in Korea.
The analogy clicked instantly. She couldn’t remember the name pico de gallo, but from then on she began calling it Mexico kimchi (멕시코 김치). Of course, it isn’t kimchi, but the comparison makes sense. Now even her friends know it by that name.
What I love most is how curious she is, always eager to connect what I share with what she knows. It’s her way of interpreting the world — through food.
Whenever we talk on the phone, she always asks:
“Yojum mwo meokgo sani?” (요즘 뭐 먹고 사니?)
It literally means:
“What are you eating these days?”
But it’s never just about food. It’s her way of asking how I am. Her way of staying close, even from far away. Over time, food has naturally become the central topic of our conversations. We send each other photos of our meals. I share my joy of discovering good eats with her. She tells me about her seasonal cooking back home. Through food, we maintain our bond across distance.
As I moved from country to country, I found myself constantly adapting recipes from home with whatever ingredients were available. Sometimes the dishes were familiar but not quite the same. Other times, they became something new altogether. I shared these experiments with my mom, and in explaining them, I started to see how different food cultures overlap.
Every summer around June, she reminds me it’s oiji (오이지) season in Korea. I tell her about similar pickles I’ve come across: kovászos uborka in Hungary, kosher dill pickle in the U.S., or my own version using whatever cucumbers I could find.
Each time, she’s curious, delighted, and full of questions.
Over time, I’ve developed a habit: noticing differences but also searching for quiet similarities. Geography, history, and language lessons I once memorized in school suddenly feel alive, embedded in the food on the table.
Even love found me through food. I met my husband in Taiwan, and I remember watching him try everything at a night market, even stinky tofu, which nearly made us both gag, while my Taiwanese colleague ate it like fine cheese.
What impressed me most was his respect toward my colleague and her culture. From him, I learned something simple but lasting: we don’t have to like everything, but we can still respect and share in another culture.
That same love language carried into my husband’s family. My father-in-law, whom I called Apa, the same word for “Dad” in both Hungarian and Korean (아빠), connected with me through food and drink. He’d say, “Let’s have pálinka,” or hand me savanyú káposzta (fermented cabbage), knowing how much I loved its kimchi-like taste.
And sometimes food speaks without a single word. Like my mother-in-law’s fridge stocked with spicy sauces such as Erős Pista, even though she can’t handle heat at all.
Or the note my sister-in-law left for my mom:
What I think it really meant was:
‘I’m sorry I haven’t had time to invite you for dinner — and thank you for helping with our children.’
Food is never just food. It’s memory, love, care, history, and language all wrapped together.
A dish like begodya (베고자 / 벼고자) reminds us of survival and adaptation, while turco points us back to origins and heritage. But both live not in written recipes, but in the act of making them together, in the memory of making them with their halmeoni (할머니) and abuela.
Food is a living history. It changes with migration, with ingredients, with people. And each meal becomes part of that story. Every time we sit down to share a dish, we also share the story behind it, the warmth it carries, the history that shaped it, the meaning it continues to build in that moment.
I want my niece and nephew to grow up knowing this: that the world is big, but not as divided as it sometimes seems. That we are connected, not separated. And that food is one of the clearest ways to see it.
This is the spirit behind this project: to gather and share these moments, and to build a space shaped by a shared language — the language of food.
Flavorful Identity is where I collect these stories, not to create a database, but to build a shared memory. A place where food becomes a guide to who we are, where we come from, and how we connect.
