I grew up eating rice, long before I had opinions about anything. I formed the habit of eating rice three times a day, learning the unwritten rule that kimchi is present at every meal. They are built into my everyday practice and rhythm, beyond borders and languages. They follow wherever I live. I miss them if I skip for a day. They don’t define who I have become, but I would not be who I am without them. The ordinary, home-cooked meals you grew up eating travel with you for life, repeated and shared. I don’t know a better way to tell our stories than through food.
It was only recently that I began to pay attention to the stories beyond the food itself. The stories of people making, people eating, and food traveling along the journey to find a new home. I just wasn’t ready to hear them yet. Clues were everywhere, but I chose to not see them. I used to take food as nothing more than a pretty thing to show off to a friend or a long list of restaurants with five-star reviews to cross out. As I began collecting new vocabularies in my pantry, I paid more attention to how best not to make a fool of myself by mispronouncing charcuterie at a French restaurant. I indulged in real, authentic tikka masala in London without thinking about how the curry ended up there in the first place.
For a while, I noticed only the difference, confining unfamiliarity to unknown territory. Then I hear a story from a friend about a homemade bone-in mango chutney arriving in her luggage, the way my mom once smuggled a jar of kimchi for me; my neighbour waking up to the smell of paratha, just like the smell of freshly cooked rice assures me I am home. For a moment, I could glimpse what their dinner table might have looked like back home, and how their mothers cared for their daughters through food in a way not so different from mine. I wish I could stand in their kitchens for a moment, watching and learning by being there, the way I used to be in my mom’s kitchen growing up. Asking obvious questions. Noticing small details that only become important later. Those details may never make it into a history book, but somehow they stay in my memory, waiting for another moment to wake them up: I’ve seen something like this before.
That is often where a story begins for me. I am less interested in the exact year kimchi was first exported than in the story of kimchi exploding halfway through its first journey to America, because the gas had nowhere to go. It is one of those small, almost ridiculous details that can stay dormant for a while, then randomly show up in my mind, like when I was standing in a family champagne cellar, hearing about bottles exploding on their way to England. Two things seemingly unrelated at first, kimchi and champagne, become connected in my mind.
As I follow those small details, they often lead me somewhere I did not expect. Sometimes they uncover memories I did not even know were still there. I start with food, but I often find myself following it into other stories that seem unrelated at first: why ojingeo is disappearing from Korean waters and why I once wanted to marry an ojingeo catcher; why it took a war for budaejjigae to happen and my friends’ confidence for me to try gochujang spaghetti; why Koreans eat scalding soup on the hottest day of the year and call it cooling. I have decided to follow where those details take me. I am enjoying that journey.
As I began writing these stories, I realized how difficult it can be to tell a story that happened in a non-English language. Stories told in the language they happened in are probably the best way to go. The food spoken in your mother tongue will give you that instant feeling, because the words carry more than the food itself. The translated phrase “cooked rice” does not carry the instant feeling that bap (밥) gives many Koreans. Because bap is so central to Korean food culture, it carries more than the meaning of cooked rice. It can also mean a meal, as in honbap (혼밥), literally “eating alone,” often translated as “solo dining,” which does not quite capture the feeling behind the word.
It’s inevitable that some terms and expressions lose their feeling when translated. But we can try to reduce what is lost in translation. This is why Flavorful Identity (fID) entries are written in the language in which they happened, capturing the original meaning and context that each word carries. They play an important role in storytelling, giving you the right amount of details without slowing you down. Most importantly, they show that these stories are connected, not separate. Somewhere along the way, our paths cross and our stories meet. Through the food we love and share, I hope we begin to see how much we have in common.
I hope Flavorful Identity can become a place where people learn about each other through food, especially those of us who move between languages, countries, kitchens, and memories. If I could, I would invite you into my kitchen and let you learn about me through a small taste of my dinner table. And I would learn a little about you too. For now, writing is the only way I know to get these stories out, so I am starting with mine first. Maybe one day, I will get to hear yours too, in your language, from your table.
