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  • Eating Korean in America: Gastronomic Ethnography of Authenticity by Sonia Ryang
  • Gowoon Noh
Sonia Ryang, Eating Korean in America: Gastronomic Ethnography of Authenticity. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2015. 160pp.

Sonia Ryang begins her book, Eating Korean in America: Gastronomic Ethnography of Authenticity, by asking the question, “Can food be both national and global?” (1). As this question indicates, her book elaborates the ways in which certain Korean “national” foods have become internationally consumed food items on restaurant menus beyond national—South Korean as well as North Korean—boundaries. The issue of the “authenticity” of “national” food, therefore, is a central theoretical touch-stone of the book. Ryang’s anthropological recipe is uniquely formatted with each chapter devoted to describing how a particular Korean dish is consumed. Her selections include the following dishes: naengmyeon, chilled noodle soup (24); jeon, Korean-style pancakes (42); galbi, barbequed beef/short ribs (64); and bibimbap, a rice bowl mixed with vegetables and/or meat (89). While Ryang traces how each dish is sold and consumed in different locations in the United States—Los Angeles, Baltimore, Hawai’i (Kona and Honolulu), and Iowa City—as “authentic” Korean food, the historical trajectories of these national dishes reveal the interplay of the colonial as well as global capitalist forces and power hierarchies within which these national cuisines and the people who produce and consume them are entangled.

In so doing, Ryang, influenced by Sidney Mintz’s (1985) pioneering work on food and colonial/global capitalism, includes in her discussion the preceding Korean experiences with colonization, such as territorial annexations, forced labor migrations, and political exclusion/social marginalization, thereby substantiating her histories of the foods and broadening the purview of her analysis. In addition, she does not limit [End Page 1293] this historically rich ethnographic study within the national boundaries of the US, but expands her anthropological aperture to related countries, such as Japan and South and North Korea. An intriguing aspect of this multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 1995) is that she traces her own personal trajectory in experiencing these food items—“following my stomach” as she puts it (18)—in Japan as a descendant of the first wave of Korean–Japanese immigration; in Pyongyang and Seoul as an overseas Korean tourist who visits her mother countries; and in Hawai’i and other cities in the US as an Asian American college professor. Additionally, her personal relationships with this national cuisine are overlapped, juxtaposed, and/or contrasted with the personal trajectories of others from various race, class, and gender backgrounds, as Ryang glosses their familiarity, or lack thereof, with specific foods, such as Southeast Asian refugee immigrants in Des Moines, middle-class Chinese international students in Iowa City, native Hawaiian residents and Japanese tourists in Hawai’i, or low-income African Americans and Korean American homeless people in Los Angeles. Nevertheless, as her book articulates, personal preferences and/or obligations regarding food consumption may serve as ethnographic moments through which unequal power relations and the dynamics of a hierarchical global economic order are manifest.

Ryang successfully corroborates her ethnographic genealogies of contemporary food (re)production and consumption mired in specific colonial and global capitalist legacies by interrogating the latter’s spatio-temporal parameters. She explains, “[…] we can grasp national cuisine as something that evolves and changes through time and space: time, because it lives in history while itself participating in the making of history; and space, because it travels transnationally, just as people do” (112). To provide a more cuisine-specific review, Chapter 1 introduces naengmyeon noodles she ate in Los Angeles in 1995 and 2011, in Pyongyang in 1985 and in Seoul in 2011. This delicate dish, originating in the northern parts of the Korean peninsula, is one of the primary food items which the North Korean government seeks to franchise out internationally, especially in China, as an “authentic” North Korean national food (28); and yet, as Ryang describes, ordinary North Korean families cannot enjoy it due to the fact that it requires freezing the noodle soup before serving, and North Korean families often cannot afford the technological facilities of refrigeration (30–31). Ryang, then, demonstrates how scenes of eating naengmyeon noodles in Seoul...

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