Food as the Mirror of Personal and Cultural Identity

As part of this year’s East and South East Asian Heritage Month theme, ‘Evolving Threads,’ we are delighted to share a personal reflection from Jiyoung Jo, Senior Cities Specialist at ING Media. In her piece, Jiyoung traces how food becomes a vessel for memory, migration and identity – revealing the ways our cultural threads shift, adapt and take on new meaning as we move through the world.

‍By Jiyoung Jo

‍Many people find themselves looking back across their lives and reflecting on a memory or experience that has stayed with them. Very often, such a moment involves food, a medium that engages all five senses.

Having only the option of choosing one elective module across four years of university, I selected mine with extreme care. I ended up in Global Noodles, a class where my homework consisted of trying different noodle cuisines from around the world. The final exam involved cooking a noodle dish of my own choice. Initially drawn in by the enticing prospect of slurping noodles in class, I had no idea that it would go on to have such a resounding impact on my life.

The dish I chose for the final exam was a South Korean hand-pulled noodle called sujebi, which my mum used to make on the rare occasion when she didn’t feel like “cooking”. It is made by tearing flour dough by hand into a hot anchovy-kelp broth alongside potatoes, Aehobak (Korean squash) and onions. It sounds like a simple dish, but I soon discovered that the story behind how these ingredients came together was far more complicated than it seemed. ‍

One of Jiyoung’s Global Noodles class assignments from 2017 was to go to a restaurant serving a cultural dish they had never tried before. That was her first time having Malaysian laksa.

I had assumed most of these ingredients were indigenous to Korea but I couldn't have been more wrong. I discovered that tracing their history led me straight into some of the most dramatic moments in my country's past. Aehobak was introduced in the seventeenth century, around the time of the Imjin War, while onions and potatoes arrived between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries via trade routes with China.

The dish itself can be traced back to the aristocracy of the Goryeo Dynasty, yet today it is regarded as a commoner's comfort food. That shift in status comes down to its main ingredient: flour. Introduced to the masses by America as wartime food aid during the Korean War, flour left Koreans unsure how to quickly popularise and consume it as an alternative to rice. This led to a nationwide post-war campaign in the 1960s (the Bunsik campaign) promoting the benefits of flour as a source of physical strength. The same movement gave rise to other well-known dishes, such as wheat tteokbokki (spicy rice cake), deep-fried twigim, corn dogs and many more, all of which now sit at the heart of the K-food culture spreading across the globe.

“Having spent most of my life outside Korea, I find that food is my main way of connecting with my roots. Learning about the ingredients that make up this quintessentially Korean dish, and then cooking and serving it as part of my final exam, helped me understand the tenacity and adaptability of my ancestors. They survived countless wars and invasions, and adjusted to decades of change brought by international trade. And that history is part of what led me to where I am.”

— Jiyoung Jo

Through this lens, I began to see the fallacy of "authenticity.” Today no one makes sujebi according to the exact Goryeo Dynasty recipe. What makes a food truly meaningful are the values it reflects and the cultural, historical and emotional memory it evokes, from the collective story of South Korea to personal memories with my mum.

Now, having settled in London, I am reinventing sujebi on my own terms: swapping anchovy-kelp broth for Worcestershire sauce, and Aehobak for courgette. It is by no means an "authentic" sujebi. But it nonetheless reflects my own journey as an immigrant who moved far from home, yet still yearns to stay connected to her roots.

Learn more about ESEA Month on our dedicated page here.