A sign at a local restaurant in Sangdo-dong, Seoul. At the bottom it reads 김치 중국산 or “Kimchi – Chinese”
By law, all restaurants in South Korea must publicly display information about where the meats, rice, and kimchi come from. The first two lines in the photo to the left read “Doejigogi Guknaesan: Pork – Domestic” and “Ssal Guknaesan: Rice – Domestic”
The third one down reads “Kimchi Jungguksan: Kimchi – Chinese”
Kimchi is the first word that comes to your mind when you think Korean food, and if it doesn’t, it should. It shows up at every single meal, comes in hundreds of varieties, and does everything from making you look younger and healthier, cleaning your arteries, to making you a super-person.
Nobody is going to argue that kimchi isn’t a quintessential Korean dish…but, next time you’re eating at a restaurant, there’s a good chance that everybody’s favorite People’s Republic to the west of Korea might be pulling a fast one on you.
It’s Chinese! It’s all Chinese!
Ok, not really, but kind of. The truth of the matter is, if you are eating kimchi at a South Korean restaurant, in South Korea, you are most likely not eating honest Korean food – it’s been imported from China. And the odds of you eating Chinese Kimchi in a restaurant are better than 50%.
The reason behind this figure is that most of the small restaurants that everybody loves in Korea simply can’t afford the prices of local goods. Most restaurants are forced to import kimchi from China just to keep their businesses afloat. Most Koreans feel a sting right in their national ego about doing this, but businesses must do what they can in order to turn a profit. From Korean Jungang Daily (2008):
“It’s really hard for restaurants to operate using only local materials because of insufficient supplies as well as the prices,” said Kim Tae-gon, public relations officer of the Korea Restaurant Association.
“Without Chinese imports, many stores would go out of business,” Kim added. “Additionally, the low price of Chinese goods helps stabilize the consumer prices of agriculture and fishery goods, making other local items affordable.”
According to Kim, there are approximately 600,000 restaurants in Korea that are less than 50 square meters in size, accounting for slightly less than 50 percent, or 260,000. Kim said a majority of these small businesses have to rely on cheap imported Chinese goods or else raise prices, which would hurt business.
This is all well and good for China, because it’s the original home of kimchi in the first place.
…Pause and wait for the uproar from the Korean population.
While kimchi is the most Korean of Korean dishes and a staple of the Korean diet, kimchi has its roots in China, to some degree. The earliest written record of a pickled vegetable dish comes from a Chinese book called The Book of Odes, written 2,600-3000 years ago. In it, there is a reference to pickling a cucumber as a part of ancestor worship. The first mention of any pickled food or kimchi predecessor only appeared during the Three Kingdoms Period, a stretch of Korean history that started around the first century AD and lasted until 668 AD. It would be not until the 17th century AD that red peppers were introduced into the Korean market, which produced the red, spicy kimchi Korea is famous for today.
Furthermore, where the Koreans got their word kimchi itself is disputed. There are two theories:
- Kimchi derives from the Korean word 지 ji or 지채 jichae meaning “vegetables soaked in salt water”
- Kimchi derives from a Korean pronunciation of the Chinese character Ham-tse meaning “picked vegetable”
In 2010, Typhoon Kompasu decimated the cabbage crop in South Korea, meaning that the production of winter/baechu kimchi (this is the red fermented cabbage one you see literally everywhere) was in serious jeopardy. President Lee Myung-bak called it a “once in a century crisis.” It looked like Koreans were either going to have to go without their most sacrosanct dish for a season or pay incredibly high prices for it. But a benevolent nation-state came to the rescue and saved Korea from a kimchi-less winter. That nation-state?
China.
The People’s Republic can even claim ownership of the name of the staple ingredient in baechu kimchi: the cabbage plant, which is more properly referred to as Chinese cabbage. There has been a proposal by Koreans to rename the cabbage “kimchi cabbage” instead, on the grounds that the Chinese cabbage plant grows differently in Korea from how it does in China – the leaves fold in a different way. This has not gone without protest in kimchi-producing China, some of whom are outraged at the name change and see it as a smack to their national ego.
All this having been said, it goes without saying that kimchi is dish intimately linked with the Korean penninsula, and Koreans rightfully should claim ownership of it. Although China may have pioneered the cabbage picking process, Koreans did take the process further and revolutionized it over time by adding spices and flavorings to produce the kimchi that all Koreans (and a lot of foreigners too!) seriously get down on. But just know, the next time you’re getting some kimchi at your local Korean kimbap shop or galbi place, you can bet that something at your table is going to be from a foreign land – and not just yourself, either.