나오미 in korea

In Korea, the summer ends as abruptly as it begins. One day in September, the summer heat wave breaks as suddenly as a raging fever, and autumn falls over the country. The sky deepens into a warm blue and fluffy clouds look like they belong to another place altogether. You no longer arrive at work dehydrated and running with sweat, to hear your perma-fresh Korean colleagues exclaim concernedly: “Oh! You are all sweaty! Are you sick?” You no longer need to sleep sprawled as one newly dead with the fan aimed at your face. Sheets, cast off like a spurned lover in June, are welcomed back into your bed. You can entertain the curious notion of perhaps one day wearing jeans and shoes again.

As the days roll into autumn and the hillsides burst into flaming colour, the women in the adult class start to grumble; and trucks, equipped with frighteningly efficient loudspeakers, fill the neighbourhood selling cabbage and garlic. Autumn is the time for women to process mountains of cabbage, garlic and radish to make kimchi. As any Korean student of English will tell you, several times and emphatically, kimchi is good for healthy. They will also tell you that their favourite food is kimchi, the thing they would miss most overseas is kimchi, kimchi is the most delicious and healthy food in the world, and kimchi is what they are most proud of about Korea. For the middle school girls, it’s either that or Super Junior, a 13-member pop band full of “sexy guy!”

Kimchi, alternatively romanized as kimchee and gimchi, is an astonishingly pungent Korean vegetable dish. Much like Germany’s sauerkraut, (and, incidentally, cattle silage), kimchi was traditionally made and fermented during the harsh winter to ensure a food supply during the cold months. Today, kimchi is celebrated as a kind of edible national identity, to the extent that the National Kimchi Field Museum was established in Seoul to recognise and celebrate Korea’s most venerated food product, with its 187 varieties. What was once a necessity of poverty and thrift has become, like so many other rustic food cultures from Tuscany to the Middle East, one of the most identifiable and celebrated things about Korea.

The process of making kimchi is as central to Korean life as the West’s roast turkey, apple pie and Christmas pudding, or rather these days, department store shopping and fast food. It begins in the fields. In November, when the weather has cooled and all the produce brought in, the roads around the apartment blocks and the main streets of town are piled with the crisp white orbs of kimchi cabbage, sometimes arrayed on tarps, sometimes piled on the backs of trucks with artful precision, mirroring the watermelons in the summertime. They are industriously tended by elderly ajumma who squat behind their wares, their hands always busy stripping vegetables, snapping off roots and offering you a shard of crisp red apple. They usually sport enormous red-trimmed sun visors, which pivot down so the entire face can be covered by a shield of opaque grey plastic, giving the women the appearance of Darth Vader with a perm. The sun protection is too late to save their nut-brown skin from the strong summer sunlight. Their faces are as wrinkled as the walnuts arrayed on plastic sheets in front of them.

Making kimchi differs from family to family, and some recipes are a closely guarded secret. Traditional kimchi cabbage is baechu, or Chinese cabbage. Great heaps are washed, sliced and then marinated in a paste of spicy red pepper, garlic, ginger, water, chopped spring onions, pieces of carrot and cucumber, and other guest ingredients added for different flavours or health benefits. Freshly prepared kimchi was then traditionally packed in squat brown earthen pots and buried in the garden with only the tops sticking out, which allowed the food to ferment while being refrigerated. In rural Korea this is still evident, but in the congested apartments of modern Korea alternative ss have necessarily been found. Now, apartment roofs, gardens and concrete slabs are stacked with kimchi pots during the winter, and in the more urbane Korean families the kimchi fridge has taken over the preservation role, allowing Korean families to preserve their kimchi free of earth and frozen ground. The kimchi fridge has the added bonus of sealing in the pungent aroma, which infiltrates other foods in the refrigerator.

Consumed all year round, kimchi comprises a good third of the thrice-daily meal eaten by most Koreans. With rice, soup and other banchan (side dishes shared by everyone), Koreans eat it as part of every meal, which accounts for the fug of digesting garlic and cabbage that fills the subways of early morning Seoul. Kimchi is so integrated into the national psyche that Koreans, when posing for photos, say “kimchi!” as we say “cheese!”

As entrenched in Korean culture as kimchi has become, myths have sprung up claiming its health properties and cancer-busting benefits. Kimchi has been variously reported to cure cancer, the common cold, flu, heart disease, obesity and depression.

While undoubtedly a healthy food, high in vitamins, low in fat and containing the cancer-busting phytochemicals of cabbage, South Korean researchers have recently identified a link between heavy consumption of kimchi and a heightened risk of developing stomach cancer, the most common cancer among Koreans. Rates of gastric cancer among Koreans and Japanese are ten times higher than in the United States, a fact tentatively correlated to the large amounts of salt and fermented ingredients.

During the avian flu crisis however, sales of kimchi rocketed as it was reported (though never scientifically proven) that the dish helped prevent people contracting the disease. Many of my students, young and old alike, informed me that the sole reason Korea hadn’t become infected with SARS was kimchi. Scientists at Seoul National University have also started floating the idea. According to an October 2005 BBC report, kimchi was fed to 13 infected chickens and 11 of them started recovering within a week. “We found that the chickens recovered from bird flu, Newcastle disease and bronchitis. The birds’ death rate fell, they were livelier and their stools became normal,” said Professor Kang Sa-ouk.

There is currently no evidence of kimchi’s effects on human sufferers of bird flu, but perhaps my Korean middle-schoolers, who almost unanimously write “Kimchi is best for healthy!” in their free-topic essays, are on to something after all.