A bite of racism ( Food and race) part 1 Please correct me. thanx Good afternoon everyone, I guess you have all had lunch by now excluding Mary. she has class in a raw all day long. Let me ask you what you had for lunch? What made us clarify some food as Korean, or some others as western food? Is this because of the ingredients used to make a special kind of food? Or there are some other stories behind?? Well, when we are consuming food, we are not only eating the simple ingredients. but we are consuming the culture that the food represents. In this regard, Food can be a reflection of a period of time in history, and highly depends on the land’s capability to grow special grains. As a simple example, the main dish in Korea is rice, mostly because rice is cultivated abundantly there. Now Getting a bit deeper in the field of food, today I want to talk with you about food and race. What I call ‘’ a bite of racism’’. I want to show you that most of us are involved in racism, while eating. Have any of you heard of the term ‘’Soul food’’? What do you think it refers to? Soul food has its roots in slavery when African-Americans had to cook with whatever food was available to them. They usually used cheap ingredients, and animal products with heavy percentage of protein such as offal meat. And most of the time they used simply to either roast or fry the meat in huge amount of oil. In this stage, we are all drowned into a very big mistake, which is racism in food. Even you were unconsciously relating soul food as African-American food while I was talking of history behind soul food. What I simply want to emphasize on is that history has no relation to lifestyle of a nation in the current time. In other words, we cannot claim soul food as African-Americans’ food only because it started from the slavery time in the past. Likewise, we cannot say Kimchi is only consumed by Koreans. There are lots of people all around the world, who like soul food such as fried chicken, French fries and the same time, Kimchi is being loved worldwide. I have a Korean friend who dislikes Kimchi and whenever she says she doesn’t like Kimchi in a group of friends. Their reaction would be How can a Korean Dislike Kimchi? I mean, come on, how can being a Korean has any relation to eating kimchi? we can feel how these artificial stereotypes about food have influenced our lives.