For my second cultural post, I decided to watch a documentary about Korean foods and street vendors. I searched on YouTube “Korean Food Documentary” and found one particular documentary that interested me. The link attached below, and the documentary was around 40 minutes long. It was aired on the Discovery channel in English, but there are many parts in the documentary that includes Korean native speakers as well as Korean subtitles throughout the whole documentary. I was able to learn about the Korean food culture as well as learn to understand and improve upon Korean speaking and reading. The subtitles were very difficult to read fast at the beginning of the documentary, but by the end of it, I was able to pick up on it pretty quickly. It was really cool to see familiar Korean words in the subtitles and I was able to identify what they were saying in some of the sentences. A couple of times throughout the documentary, they interviewed street vendors as well as customers who buy food in Korea. It was really interesting to hear the different accents and tones of the different native Korean speakers, and I was able to understand most of what they were trying to say. Looking at the foods from the documentary, there were a lot of foods that I recognized and have eaten before from Korean restaurants or from dinner with my family at home. The documentary dove into the history of Korean food culture and how each kind of food became popular in Korea. I learned a lot about the history of commonly popular street foods such as Hoppang. Overall, I was very fascinated after I finished the documentary because of all the new information I learned about my country’s food culture. The biggest difference between Korean food culture and American food culture is the way the food is presented. Korean food comes with an entrée as well as many different side dishes called “bonchon.” Different from American food where it is mostly one main entrée and only a couple of side dishes, Korean meals usually come with at least 5 different sides or bonchon. A great way to think about the layout of Korean means is like Thanksgiving dinner. For Thanksgiving, we tend to create many side dishes to accompany the main turkey and ham. Similar to this, Korean meals have rice and meat as the entrees and side dishes like soup, kimchi, tofu, etc. to accompany their main meal. Many of the Korean side dishes are made from vegetables and that is what makes Korean food so healthy. A lot of the bonchons are fermented over many weeks to create a unique flavor. This is very common for side dishes like Kimchi. Overall, I am pleased with what I have come out with from this documentary. I learned and improved on Korean reading by reading the subtitles in Korean. I have improved on my listening in Korean from the different interviews of Korean natives in the documentary. And lastly, I have learned about the core culture of Korean food and how history plays a big role in the food.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpQ94EkzG6c&ab_channel=miky1209
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