by David Wills

Created on: February 16, 2009

Indeed, it may be "the cabbage you can ravage with the chilli paste taste," but kimchi isn't that amazing. I mean, taste is subjective and everything, but can anything really be so awesome that an entire nation of people could be obsessed with it? Even in America
people vary their fast-food diets. One day it's fried chicken and the next it's hamburgers, and sometimes it's a pizza. But in Korea, people are so crazy about kimchi that it goes beyond ridiculous. It's something that has to be experienced to be understood, and I think it's impossible to exaggerate the love Koreans have for their national dish.

I'd never even heard of the stuff until I came to Korea, and when I was presented with a side dish of it at dinner, I thought, Hmm, this is ok. It was indeed palatable, but nothing special. The next day I was given it for lunch, then dinner. And the next day. And the next. Pretty soon I opted to pass over the kimchi. It wasn't that it tasted awful, but rather that it just wasn't good enough to eat twice a day.

But kimchi is everywhere in Korea and ignoring it won't make it go away. I work in a school, and consequently I have to discuss food with my kids to teach them the English words for edible things. "What did you have for breakfast?" "Kimchi." "Lunch?" "Kimchi." "Dinner?" "Kimchi." Koreans literally eat kimchi three meals a day. Frequently, they will have kimchi jjigae (soup, or stew) with a side of kimchi. There's also kimchi in many other foods, served with a side of kimchi. I wondered how much kimchi the average Korean ate each year, and checked out the statistics, and found that they consume seventy-seven pounds of it per capita, per year.

"What is your favourite food?" I asked every kid in my school at least once a semester, when the textbooks dictate this a necessary discussion. "Kimchi, and" They'll usually mention two things, but one of them will always be kimchi. I recently asked my class to write an essay about their favourite food, and most of them were about kimchi. One of them was the word "kimchi" written two hundred times on a piece of paper.

When I leave school, having had my kimchi-based school lunch and kimchi fuelled children talking about kimchi, the last thing I really want to think about is kimchi. Yet I hop on the subway and there it is: the smell of a hundred people who've eaten fermented cabbage for three meals that day, and three the day before, farting, burping, coughing and breathing kimchi into the air. Ass-kimchi is worse even than

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