The cultural authentic artifact that I will write about in this post is korean food. I personally enjoy korean food greatly but when I talked with my other peers at the University of Richmond who also do. We found that there are not that many places to eat Korean food that are “worth” it because they are too pricey for the quality and taste of the food they make. This however proves how highly people think of Korean food and how big a part of Korean culture the food is. For the most part, most dishes in Korea are centered around rice, vegetables, and meat. There is also a lot of side dishes known as (반찬), pronounced bahn-chan, which typically accompany the rice and are intended to be eaten as a compliment to the main dish which is usually made of vegetables, meats, or a combination of both. One of the most common side dishes is kimchi, which is basically salted, fermented vegetables with a little bit of spice. It is commonly in all meals because it is one of the few side dishes that can go along in tandem with any other food item, whether it be rice, vegetables, and even meat. Another big combo in korea is (치맥), pronounced chi-mech. It is literally fried chicken that is either sweet or hot/spicy and beer but it has become a staple in Korea for its taste and how famous it is among all people in Korea that are of drinking age of course. In addition, one thing that has become famous in Korea is something called mukbang (먹방). It is a live online broadcast stream from some streamings sites like twitch, afreecatv, and even youtube where the streamer eats food while interacting with viewers/fans. Some notable videos I watched to better understand this are streamers like BBANZ, MBro, Shugi, and DKD. It has become a phenomenon in Korea to the point that there are a couple of streamers that make enough income to sustain an incomes themselves with their mukbangs without having to work another job. I have read and listened to a few korean transcript interviews by these youtubers and streamers and found they made good money off these streams and were even given sponsorships by companies to further promote a brand which brought more income to both parties involved in this process. A common trend with these streamers is to also to do ASMR which stands for, Autonomous sensory meridian response. It is where an individual gets a tingling sensation from the back of the head that moves all the way down to the spine. The methods the streamers do to complete this is by the streamer wearing a mic on their shirt and they eat the food next to the mic which produces an ASMR response for those listening to their streams with or without earbuds. In some cases, fans will even pay for the streamers’ food. The fans will buy exorbitant amounts of food at the pleasure of being able to watch the streamer devour or eat all the food without wasting any of it on their stream, which they either pay to watch or not like if it is on youtube or twitch. It is an interesting phenomenon that blew up in Korea and many other people around the world have started following this trend and done food challenges and mukbangs.
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Interesting post, Tommy, but it's crucial in the future that you provide an actual artifact, or a product that helps to share the authentic cultural content with the rest of the SDLAP. It could be a picture, map, video, song, etc.
Thank you for your insight. I will make sure to do this in my future posts!