Our pantries, ourselves

Remember last year when Americans were warned that our beloved canned pumpkin--the golden orange pie filling that brings us warm feelings of family and turkey with stuffing and hot apple cider and all things that get us through the cold winter--could disappear from grocery store shelves because heavy rains had wreaked havoc on the nations pumpkin patches? For months, Grandma's pantry staple was absent. Fortunately, it has made its triumphant return just in time for the holiday season. Imagine what Thanksgiving dinner would be like without a slice of pumpkin pie!

Now, imagine if you ate pumpkin pie not just at Thanksgiving, but at every meal, and that the cost of a can of pumpkin pie filling suddenly shot up from $2.50 to $14.

According to the New York Times, this is the story facing South Korea right now. As pumpkin pie is to Americans, kimchi is to South Koreans, and at this moment, a main component of the famously odorous side dish--Napa cabbage--is suffering the same fate as last year's pumpkins. A daily staple on Korean dinner tables, kimchi is quickly becoming a delicacy that fewer and fewer people are able to afford, or even get their hands on. Even restaurants, who typically offer it as a free side the way that American restaurant-goers receive a free bread basket, are starting to charge for it.

It has become such a "national tragedy," as one South Korean newspaper put it, that the government is getting involved. President Lee Myung-bak, who recognizes kimchi as "integral to daily life" in his country, is vowing to stick to cheaper and less desirable cabbage--the North American variety that you probably enjoy in your coleslaw--in a show of solidarity for those South Koreans who cannot afford the higher price of the good stuff.

While it may be easy to chuckle at how such a simple thing as a side dish can cause a national uproar, it nonetheless represents a humbling example of how much our cultural identities are defined by what we eat. As anyone who has ever lived in another country will tell you, there's nothing like a taste of home when you have been away, and it is sobering to realize how much we take those things for granted when we discover that they are not so readily available everywhere. Some of my extended family living in Hungary, for example, found it enough of an occasion when marshmallows first arrived in Budapest that they wrote home about it. My Japanese roommate in college received huge box of food from her mother--a square yard of little candies and canned goods and teas that cost who knows how much to send all the way to Minnesota, but which was priceless to her as she pulled out sundry goodies whenever she was feeling homesick. Something about my overseas family having the essential binding agent for Rice Krispies treats, and something about my roommate having everything she needed to make a good curry, made them feel closer to home. More American. More Japanese.

So is it a "national tragedy" that so many South Koreans are being deprived of their beloved kimchi? I would say so, and I am imagining the aroma of pumpkin pie as I do.

by Stacey Peterson