This cultural post explores Korean restaurant culture, which corresponds with task 5 of my learning plan. Here, I highlight particular findings that stood out to me from Sara Thacker’s “The Culture of Eating in South Korea”.
In South Korea, food culture revolves are the communal experience that one has while eating with friends, family, and coworkers. In describing her experience in Korea, Thacker details that during a meal, everyone would share a particularly large dish, which would incite conversation about the food since no one has an individual plate (as done in Western cultures) and instead, everyone eats the same food. Furthermore, while meals are centered around a particular dish, there are also banchan, which are small side dishes that accompany the main dish, and which are also shared by all persons present (Thacker). As Thacker points out, while eating at a restaurant one should not be particularly worried about running out of banchandue everyone sharing these small side dishes or because of the seemingly limited amount of this part of the meal: banchanis actually unlimited so when a server sees that there is no more on the table, the (s)he would bring more, free of charge. As such, it is evident that there are significant distinctions between American and Korean food practices, particularly in how people eat: in Korea, people eat communally, and this effectively reinforces notions of community while in the US, people eat from their own individual plates, which may be reflective of the American values of personal space, privacy, and individualism.
Bibliography
Thacker, Sara. “The Culture of Eating in South Korea.” Greenheart Travel, 2013, https://greenhearttravel.org/teach-abroad-south-korea/the-culture-of-eating-in-south-korea.
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