Kim Jong

One of the first lessons I had to teach my high-level students at school was "what will you do this fall." I had only been living with my host family for a week or two and had no idea what there actually was that set Korean falls apart from America's, but I put down "I will make Kimchi this fall" as a phrase to practice, figuring that the dish was eaten so much it had to be made sometime during the fall. I had no idea how much it actually does mark the season here. During November its gotten to the point where piles of cabbage, red pepper bags, and mixing tubs have seemed more like some weird lawn decorations, stacked to all heights along houses or restaurants, than they do actual food staples.

Two Saturdays ago, my host family met with their extended family for Kim Jong (the hangul input on my computer is on a fritz right now, so I can't write the Korean) -- the proper name for making a large batch of cabbage kimchi in the fall. My host mother woke me up early in the morning and we drove to my host father's mother's house, where my host-grandmother cooked breakfast while everyone else gathered together the supplies that would go into the kimchi: red pepper, glutinous rice paste, oil, cabbage, turnips, garlic, green onions, and other odds and ends that I don't know the names of.

After a long process of mixing the red pepper, oil, rice paste, and turnips strips together we all sat on the ground and began to spread the paste all over the cabbage head. Then the cabbage heads were packed tightly into tupperware containers. The whole process took about five or so hours and we went through somewhere between 100-200 heads of cabbage.

Before the advent of refrigerators, greenhouses, and food imporation, Kimchi was one of the few ways for Koreans to get greens through the winters. Traditionally, Kimchi was fermented in large clay pots that you can still see outside of traditional homes, but the smell from the pots coupled with the fact that most koreans now live in large apartment high-rises where space is limited has made Kimchi refrigerators a better option for fermenting the cabbage. The big tupperware containers are put into the kimchi refrigerator and, for our family, the containers will sit in the refrigerator for a year before they are eaten. The refrigerators are specially designed to change temperature and moisture conditions throughout the year depending on the stage of fermentation that the cabbage is in.

Healthwise, Kimchi is great. It has high levels of carotene, absorbic acid, vitamins B1 and B2, and Calcium and Iron. The long fermentation process also provides a lot of bacteria that's beneficial for digestion. The American magazine Health ranked Kimchi on its list of the world's top 5 healthiest foods.

Kimchi's also resurrected a lot of the cultural tensions between Japan and Korea surrounding the Japanese occupation -- and Japan's recent attempt to claim kimchi as a traditional Japanese food, rather than Korean food. You can read about it here