Given a moment to catch my breath, I feel the time has come to write about something that has unexpectedly overrun my everyday life since last winter.

We often speak of terroir in relation to food—the way soil and the sun, landscape and the seasons become what we eat. But I have come to believe that pottery carries that same sense of terroir.

In Bizen, pots are defined first by its clay. Every clay body carries the character of the place it came from—whether dug from the side of a mountain or three meters beneath a rice field. Over the years, potters come to know these clays intimately, developing their voice by finding clay bodies they love—and, inevitably, hoarding them.

It’s a hot July evening in our pottery school’s share house dining room. Our necks were slick with sweat beneath the unrelenting heat, when my friend Mika told me something that gripped me the moment the words left her mouth:

“Glaze can be made from any kind of ash.”

At high enough temperatures, ash will melt into a glass-like liquid. In the heat of the kiln, the minerals in the ash (think silica, potassium, calcium, and sodium) react and flow across the surface of the clay before cooling into the hard, glossy exterior we call glaze.

She told us about her home in Israel, burnt down in a forest fire. After the fire, she collected the ashes and turned it into glaze.

New life from what was lost.

It feels almost sacrilegious to put words to it.

Immediately, my mind started racing with ideas about how pottery might carry a sense of place. How could we make glaze defined by landscape, just as our food is? How can I make pottery that speaks to the place, no matter where I go?

I began turning my attention to the plants and food scraps around me. Starting with some personal local favorites—mugwort and persimmons— I quickly learned that not every plant could be a suitable glaze ingredient. Persimmons, with their high moisture content, were too wet to burn into ash. As for mugwort, I was immediately warned that an unfathomable quantity would be required in order to produce enough ash for even a small batch of glaze.

But as the ideas continued to ferment and the leaves began to fall, winter arrived, bringing with it mikan season.

In Japan, winter is nearly synonymous with tangerines. Soon, the peels piling up in the trash began to call.

It seemed, at first, simple enough.

Burn the peels, mix the ash with water and feldspar, coat the pieces. How difficult could it be?

Instead, it quickly revealed itself to be one of the most humbling lessons I have ever received.

Nature should not be underestimated, nor should we impose upon it our illusions of dominance.

The process began with eating A LOT of of mikan. I bought boxes upon boxes of the fruit from farmers markets, and soon my housemates, classmates, friends, and even my church congregation began donating to charity. They watched as I spread the peels out to dry, day after day, over the wood-fired stove built by the hands of my brilliant teacher. All winter, the scent of citrus was suspended in the air of the studio, almost to an offensive point; in Japan, they call it smell harassment.

Even curious potters from town who arrived at the school for business began chipping in. They collected peels from their own homes, returning with baskets full of treasure, laughing as they joked that I might have abandoned pottery for Chinese medicine.

Without ever deciding it, we had become a small community gathered around peels.

But even then, it wasn’t enough.

As I began tediously burning these dried peels in a tiny pot for coal, my meager amount of ash produced after a month or so showed that I was nowhere near making glaze possible. Tangerine ash makes approximately 1% the mass of the original peel’s mass.

I had barely a handful.

As time marched on and began to run low, a concerned classmate suggested I call local farmers for help.

“Sofie, at this rate, you’re not going to make it to the March firing… We start loading the kiln in February.” “What about the Mikan farms in Hinase?” she suggested.

Phone calls in Japanese — one of my greatest fears.

But now, my graduation project was on the line. So it began. I started searching for mikan farmers on the islands of Hinase, a quiet seaside town in Bizen. It’s a serene place where citrus orchards overlook the Inland sea, where oyster beds rest still in the water. I targeted farms that made juices and jams; surely, they would have peels left behind.

When I reached Yamamoto Farm, they sounded puzzled.

“You want...our peels?”

Then came the answer that changed everything.

“Yes, we can save them for you.”

When I drove out to collected them at the end of the week,

Two cardboard boxes waited for me, packed tight with mikan peels.

As the woman from the shop helped load them into my car, she smiled,

“If you’d like, we’ll have more next week.”

And so I began returning to Yamamoto farm every weekend, collecting this gift that felt wholly undeserved. Never wanting to arrive empty-handed, I brought gifts from my own kitchen: cookies, cakes, or whatever I had baked that week. But the exchange never felt equal — what they were giving me was far greater than a few sweet treats.

The next day, I drove back to the school with my car filled with citrus, carefully spread the peels across drying rack above the stove, and hurried back and forth between tending the fire, throwing pots, burning ash, and drying more peels with my clay encrusted hands before returning to the wheel again.

It was a busy winter. As my community observed, more and more generous people began pitching in materials of their own.

One afternoon, as I pretended to keep to a small fire of peels under control, a kind elderly man visiting from Tokyo hovered over me, telling me stories of a potter he knows in Nagano, who makes ash glaze out of pruned apple trees.

“I have the ash at home, but never got around to using it” he said. “Would you like some?”

I could hardly believe my luck.

“In return,” he asked, “send me photos of the results.”

After he returned home, a package arrived along with the new year: a carefully sealed Ziplock bag of apple wood ash and a note apologizing for the delay — he had washed the ash seven times before drying it and sending it to me.

Then my teacher, Takahara-sensei, joined in.

“What about acorn leaf glaze? I'm helping with a neighborhood cleanup this weekend," he said. "We'll be raking up all the oak leaves. Would you like me to collect some for you?"

The following Monday, he pulled into school with the bed of his truck overflowing with eight enormous trash bags full of leaves. Together, we burned them in a steel barrel he prepared outside the studio.

Then came the mountain grapes.

One afternoon at work, my boss, Yuya, pointed toward the dried vines climbing the walls behind his studio.

“You can have all of those if you’d like.”

The next day, with pruning shears in hand, Takahara-sensei and I ran off from school into Yuya's tangled forest of mountain grape vines, emerging with arms full of potential.

So I returned to school, burning through the bounty of my community.

And just like that, I had a fruit salad of ash in my pockets.

When the end of January rolled around, it was evident that I still didn’t have enough ash. Months of labor had yielded only three hundred and fifty grams — barely enough to just make one variation of glaze.

Yuya encouraged me to call more growers.

Some refused. They did not know me. They did not understand why anyone would want discarded peels.

So he began dialing people himself.

Wholesalers.

Friends.

A friend with a jelly factory.

One morning he called.

“I found you two hundred kilograms.”

A hero.

When I finally mixed my first substantial batch of glaze, I took half of the collected ash and left it milling overnight at school.

The next morning I found,

disaster struck.

The rubber seal of the container had deteriorated over the decades and failed, emptying out its contents to the floor.

We desperately scraped together what we could, but most was lost to the ground.

To dust we all return.

Looking back, I had been reckless. Perhaps ignorant—ignorant of the sheer amount of labor required: not only to make the ash, but to test glaze recipes, bisque fire my pieces, prepare the larger batches of glaze, apply them to every piece, and load them into the kiln, each one precariously balanced on three seashells to prevent them from sticking to the shelves — all while in a town where glazing is nearly taboo. Or perhaps, I simply could not have understood the scale of the work until I was already drowning in it.

Time was running out. Yuya opened his studio to me, guiding me through making test pieces and tweaking recipes. When he heard how I was processing my peels at school, he lent me his kiln to burn all the peels at once, making my coal pot method seem straight up foolish. Nathan fired peels outside while I worked fervently inside the studio, grinding ash and mixing ingredients.

So many hands became part of these pots.

As we began loading our school kiln, piece by piece over the course of a week, my glazes were still not made. Up until the very last days, I was still collecting, drying, and burning peels. It was a race to the end.

And now it’s all a blur.

The firing was eight days and nights around the clock. From 4 p.m. to midnight, I tended the fire, slowly raising the temperature to 1250°C using only red pine.

As the fire consumed the kiln, my thoughts became consumed with fear.

I had placed all my eggs in one basket.

What if it all fails?

What if I had not properly secured the pieces sitting on their shells?

What if the force of the fire blows them all off balance?

What if all the glazed pieces fused together inside the kiln?

What if I have nothing to show for at the exhibit?

What if my pieces stick to my classmates’ pieces and ruin their work in the process too?

And yet, there was nothing left I could do. The kiln is sealed and the fire has taken over. Now, all we could do was wait.

After a week of firing, we let the kiln cool for another week before unloading.

Unloading the kiln was an all-day ordeal—dizzying, in a single word. From morning until sundown, we carefully crawled in and out of its gaping mouth, harvesting the fruits of our labor.

Piece after piece emerged from the kiln, seemingly endlessly, like the contents of Mary Poppins’ bag. And because Bizen-ware is characteristically unglazed, everything was comically some shade of brown. Like a word repeated too many times until it loses its meaning, before long, I no longer knew what I was looking at.

The results were

mildly disappointing

initially.

No pieces emerged as I had hoped, and none resembled the test pieces from the electric kiln.

Nature will never be ours to control.

But that was the first lesson this glaze taught me.

At some point, I was hit with the realization that there is no such thing as a tree ash. Even within a single tree, the ash from its leaves, branches, bark, and roots produce different glazes.

A tree is no more chemically uniform than a landscape.

As it grows, it draws minerals from the soil—calcium, potassium, sodium, silica, phosphorus—and distributes them where needed. Leaves, busy with photosynthesis, carry a different chemical composition than branches and roots. Even grazing goats seem to know this as they instinctively seek out nutrient-rich leaves over woody branches.

When burned, its chemistry and history is left behind in the ash.

Then in the kiln, silica melts into glass while every other mineral in their proportion plays their part, dictating how the glaze flows, pools, colors, and crystallizes.

To me, making glaze from plant ash feels closest to what goats are doing when they graze on wildflowers and turn them into milk — gathering the photosynthetic bounty of a landscape, concentrating it, and transforming it into something new.

Glaze is less something we make than something we coax into revealing itself.

And then there is the added complexity of wood firing.

Even in unglazed work, where a pot sits in the kiln will determine how it will emerge. Whether it stands upright or upside down, on its side, against a neighbor with rice straw in between, or is hidden in the shadow of a larger piece, each work inhabits a different microclimate. Much like how we are shaped by environment, no two pieces will ever be the same.

Yet with time, my disappointment began to shift.

In the time between unloading the kiln and installing the work at the Bizen Museum of Art for our graduation exhibition, I spent hours processing the pieces—holding them in my hands, sanding their surfaces, and washing away their dust. Through this intimate process, I began to encounter them differently.

Sitting with them for hours, I slowly released them from the weight of my expectations, and let them be.

Only then, did I see they were beautiful.

Surfaces I had instinctively dismissed and averted my eyes from caught the light differently. What had seemed like blemishes became stories of nature and where it came from — and truly, what is more beautiful than that?

This winter was not about mastering a material. It was about learning what it means to receive from a place and its people, and how to honor these interactions. It was about learning how to ask for help. It was about learning to let go of expectations and simply observe. To marvel and to toil, to play with nature, coming simultaneously closer to and farther from understanding.

The clay came from this landscape.

The ash came from the fruit.

The glaze came from generosity.

The pieces came from my community.

When holding a handmade bowl or a wheel of cheese, we hold more than an object. We hold the people, the soil, the place, and the invisible labor of countless lives. Within that lies scenes of chaos no doubt, of lost minds, being held by community somewhere along the way.

Perhaps, that is what I was searching for all along.

Not just pottery that comes from a place,

but pottery that could not have come from anywhere else.

This is not the end — the work has only begun!

During this process, a lot of people have asked me, “What color does mikan glaze make?”

To which I say : Girl, I don’t know. 😂

Even with the simplest mikan glaze recipe on an iron-rich Bizen clay body, the results were incredibly unpredictable. In an electric kiln, what emerges as white with green/yellow speckles in oxidation firings, comes out blue in reduction. In a wood-fired kiln, though, you can only toss your hand in the air…. Sometimes it's pale blue, almost silvery. Sometimes it's ocean blue and orange. And sometimes, when it mixes with the ash of the firewood, it turns green with pools that look almost pink!

At this stage, the only thing I am certain of is my uncertainty.

Glaze is a medium that requires years of testing and more testing. I will continue to adjust and fire again and again and again.

Until then, I will rest. I will return home and enjoy time with my family — its been two years too long.

As milk trekker, my favorite nomadic cheesemaker, once put it, “the cheese is in the milk, and the clay is in the pot.”

The glaze is in the ash.

-Sofie

Nandal Seo is a multidisciplinary visual communicator from Seoul, currently based in London.

Nandal does it all, from photography to art direction to graphic design and visually striking video essays, but I first came to know her as an incredible creative force at the dining table. As she was finishing her MA in Visual Communication at the Royal College of Art, she hosted a series of participatory workshops centered around food; one of which was titled Potluck: Some reasons for eating ssam (lettuce), co-hosted with Lisa of It’s a local collective.

Around twenty people packed into a gorgeous studio space, warmly lit by taper candles propped up by granny smith apples. We were instructed to arrange the food we’d brought for the potluck across the table, then Nandal introduced the Korean way of eating ssam—greens, protein, rice atop a sheet of lettuce wrapped up into bite size parcels and savored with bulging cheeks.

We feasted with saucy fingers and verbal astonishment at how darn good it all was, accompanied by soft sounds of Korean jazz from a playlist that Nandal had curated for the event. Later, she explained her current explorations into the creolization of food—how the lines of “authenticity” and influence between different cultural foods become blurred and expanded, therefore calling our very identities into a place of ambiguity, or otherwise the point of intersection where different cultures converge to create a new expression of the culture.

The origins of jazz as a genre are quite similar, bringing together elements of African rhythms and European musical traditions, then further reinterpreted by musicians in Korea.

A few months after that first dinner party, I’m happy to say that I can now call Nandal a friend; further evidence of the way that food can bring people together, whether you’re grubbing out or just nerding out about it in theory. Naturally, I had to tap into her knowledge as I delved into my own research topic for this year, so I found myself toting tupperwares full of namul to her apartment and studio space to fill our bellies and pick her brain.

(Note: The vast majority of this conversation was conducted in Korean and translated in post.)

Slivers of a Venn Diagram

YC: I find it interesting as I embark on this research is that there’s so much overlap between our projects, and yet our focus is almost on completely different ends of the spectrum—you study the creolization of food, i.e. where different cultures mesh and blend, while I’m trying to go back to the origins of namul from the beginning, something very distinctly Korean, and attempting to preserve the Korean cultural stories through it.

NS: You mean differences between our individual practices? Right, right.

YC: I think your research is so important, which almost seems like the antithesis of my own, so I’m trying to articulate why it matters so much to me that Korean culture should be passed down and preserved. Why I feel such sadness at the thought of it being lost.

NS: I understand. But I do think what you’re studying is really important; if there’s no historical basis of cultural origin, there can be no study of its development and transformation. If you don’t understand the cultural origins of a particular food, you can’t experience the joys of seeing boundaries mixed and blurred, or of observing the different diverse mutations that come out from them.

I guess the point of my practice isn’t to encourage everything to become creolized. I see it as an interesting softness of boundaries, of cultures mixing and meshing, acting asa subversion to what could be a conservative notion of maintaining "old ways” or tradition if taken to the extreme. Almost just as an open minded, alternative way of thinking. I don’t know if they’re necessarily opposed concepts, and that’s what I want to keep researching. In that way, you and I aren’t necessarily coming from completely different perspectives.

YC: That makes a lot of sense. I find it really interesting how we’ve both arrived at where we have, and I think it’s because I had relatively less exposure to “pure” Korean culture [while growing up in the United States] as opposed to fusion foods. I came to romanticize it more. The fact that I’m so fixated on namul is because I crave it, since it’s not readily available.

NS: I agree completely, because I grew up in Korea, where there wasn’t much diversity. It’s very monocultural, so when I got out and saw examples of cultures blending, I started fantasizing about it, finding it really interesting.

YC: So it’s interesting to me that you and I are so different, yet still categorized under the umbrella term of “Korean diaspora.”

Cycles

YC: Speaking of differences… When are some instances that you really feel “different”?

NS: That’s a huge question. I think that’s hard for me to answer, because upon investigating my differences with others, I always end up finding that we’re all basically the same on the inside. But we’re all still completely different. It’s a cycle, and I tend to acknowledge that the cycle exists and enjoy moving through it.

I’m like, Wow, you and I are so different, but then get to a place where I think, But humans are all the same creature at the end of the day, then back to people are so unique and different. Then back and forth.

Of course we’re all different; we come from different cultures, raised in different environments, even in different climates. The way we experience a particular temperature is different, so we’ll think about it differently, dress differently depending on it. But you know, there are always moments when you realize that people all over the world are still just the same people. But still… sometimes I take a step back and realize… People are really different.

YC: But still the same at the end of the day. Namul is namul (haha)

Who gets to define history and culture?

NS: So the city of Seoul is planning to completely overhaul Euljiro and develop it soon.

YC: Euljiro is like… Hackney?

NS: Right. It’s a little worn, there’s tons of artists, and from the 70s and 80s, there’s a lot of ironwork going on. Lots of handicrafts coming out of the area, and a lot of old business establishments, pochas serving traditional food… though even if we say “traditional,” it’s probably just from the 70s and 80s, considering our country’s history.

There’s a building called Sewoon Sangga (plaza), which houses tons of handicraft artists and other small, independent practitioners. When it was first built, it was considered to be super fancy. Now it’s a bit run down, but the plan is that the city of Seoul is going to tear it all down and renovate it, making Euljiro a new, sparkly, beautiful neighborhood.

With it, they plan to get rid of all of the surrounding buildings and businesses as well. I was discussing this with my family, and how my peers and myself love going there, eating at the pochas and visiting the small, cute cafes that have been popping up, viewing artists’ studios. The buildings were also designed by an architect who was pretty well known at the time, and I personally really enjoy that aesthetic.

Anyways, I wanted to see if there was any possible way to preserve this plaza, because I see it as part of our tradition, part of our history. But someone in my father’s generation would question why that should be considered Korean history; it was built at a time when Korea was just beginning to industrialize, when we didn’t have any resources nor expertise on how to build a city. He thinks it’s a part of history that has no real thought and intention behind it, so he would prefer resetting it now and creating new iterations of Korean culture.

Since it was built when Korea just achieved liberation and after the Korean War, it’s only been about 50 years since it was built. To me, that’s a pretty long history and I wish it would be preserved, but the older generation would think of historical buildings that need preservation as something like Kyeongbokgung… or hanboks. Hanoks. Traditional teas (haha).

I don’t think [our parents’ generation] is really considering something like Euljiro’s Golbaengi Street’s history, why it began, when we started importing and eating it… But like we discussed earlier, it was a time when there was a big rush to globalize, shaking off Japanese colonial influence and now becoming more Westernized, so there isn’t this sense of understanding it as part of Korea’s traditional culture.

But yet, it is something we need to acknowledge as part of our history. It’s unfortunate that part of Korea’s history means that we were separated into two countries due to America’s intervention, and that there are so many parts where we’ve taken on influences of the Western world, but I still think those are things we need to preserve and take forward with us, too.

Do you really think that the only way to preserve Korean culture is to strip off every other country’s influence to find a sort of pure and authentic “Korean soul”? I think part of finding that “soul” means we need to search within the mutated result of all of that.

YC: Can’t we just keep both? Can’t we keep [Euljiro] as it is and build new structures to represent our culture? Like DDP (lol)... just have a Korean architect design it.

NS: Yeah, I agree.

YC: So what happened? What did they decide to do after all?

NS: They decided to break it down. They’ve been going around to people who work there to convince them to vacate the space, giving them financial compensation… So this is the last street of pochas remaining in Korea, but we don’t know how much longer it’ll last.

There were a lot of activists who protested against these changes in Euljiro, but they weren’t successful; the majority of Seoul’s citizens just see it as messy and dirty, so they prefer redevelopment.

YC: I see where they’re coming from, that they want to erase a bit of the history that seems rather shameful to them, but I feel like it’s still important to look it in the face and acknowledge that it happened. We can’t go back and rewrite history, and knowing that the West had become such an economic force around the time of this development, Korea simply had no choice but to take in that influence.

NS: Right, we’ve been influenced by those cultures; the “Korean culture” we have now has been baked under those circumstances whether we like it or not. So instead of falling into despair at how things have shaken out, I’m more interested in how we can prepare this baked outcome so that it’s delicious to eat. How best to serve it up, and what kind of new recipes can result from seeing our culture the way it is now.

YC: But also referencing the past source material.

NS: Yes. It’s really necessary work. Because I think we can only figure out the new recipes once we know the original ones. I guess you’re also thinking about stuff like this, too. I think like this all the time, but a lot of people—a lot of Koreans—question why I’m so fixated on these ideas.

YC: I feel like because Korea has been through so much oppression and hardship as a country, they really want to move on from that traumatic past. I understand why; I understand that they don’t want to stay there when they? we’ve? worked so hard to move beyond it, they don’t want that to be the dominant narrative any more.

NS: But I agree that it’s important to still keep it in mind, and to take the time to process the effects of it, especially at a time like now when Korean culture is gaining such rapid popularity, and Korea is just pumping out cultural exports… Culinary Class Wars had such a widespread impact, as did Squid Game, Korean dramas and movies, all sorts of foods—it’s all creating such a buzz, but I think that makes it even more important that we stop and examine what exactly it is that we’re making, and why we’re making it in the first place.

두유노 마르코프차 (Korean Carrot Salad)?

“Korean Carrot Salad” made its way to my FYP as I was transcribing this interview, and I thought it was a perfect food to illustrate the topics covered throughout my conversation with Nandal: an approximation of kimchi developed by Goryeo-ins (Korean diaspora in post-Soviet countries).

Carrots are used in lieu of radish and napa cabbage, white vinegar and salt to mimic shrimp jeot, and cayenne pepper instead of gochugaru. Morkovcha is far from what I understand as kimchi and it isn’t regularly consumed in Korea, but it’s now understood and eaten as its own discrete Korean dish.

What then, are the bounds of a cultural identity?

Is this carrot salad (a pickle, really) Korean despite an absence of “Korean” ingredients?

If it isn’t eaten by Koreans in Korea?

Would an altered version of Morkovcha (say, without the presence of spice from peppers) still classify as such?

If a non-Korean person developed a similar pickled dish inspired by kimchi, would that be considered Korean?

I don’t think these questions necessarily have black and white answers, but they are certainly on my mind in light of Korean-American Day which has just passed us by.

Anyways, thank you to my Chinese spy over on TikTok for introducing me to this wonderful dish, and RIP to the end of an era. I’m sure I’ll still be able to enjoy this wretched app for a bit longer while I’m still in London, but things won’t be the same.

This is the first of a series of interviews I am conducting with the Korean diaspora that bring unique dialogues and perspectives throughout my thesis research. Thank you to my first participant, and I would love to chat with anyone who has anything at all to add to the conversation. Hit me up on Instagram, where I’m hoping to continue uploading progress through my Masters degree.

Nandal is currently taking on freelance projects as part of SPILLLL Studio, curating and facilitating project dinners at Gachitayo and researching her way through the best bites of London.

Thanks for reading!

Namul is ubiquitous in Korean cuisine. For how prominent its presence is within the category of banchan (side dishes) that populate the table, it’s somewhat tricky to define.

Namul is a type of banchan. It’s also the category of raw ingredients used in said banchan. Also, technically any edible thing can become namul as long as it’s prepared in the correct way. For example, an eggplant is categorically a vegetable, but eggplant namul is.. a namul. But it’s still an eggplant. It’s like how we learned in math class that all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares. There’s similarities and overlap, but the two terms are not interchangeable. Not all plants/vegetables are namul, but all namul are plants. Except for when they aren’t, as in the case of mushroom namul (fungi, not a plant)) or seaweed namul (algae, not a plant). 

My point is, namul resists categorization and convenient translation into the English language, hence my decision to refer to it by its Korean name in my research instead of something like “Traditional Korean Vegetables” or “Korean Herb Dish.” If we can easily introduce words like hummus or even kimchi to our gastronomic lexicon, I think it’s worth calling namul what it is. 

Whatever it is. 

on translations and taxonomy

When it comes to other words like gochugaru (crushed red [Korean] chili flakes) or soy sauce (ganjang??????) it’s a constant question of whether to use the Romanization of the Korean term, or to simply translate it despite imperfections in the language. 

As Korean immigrants to the United States, everyone in family has two names. My brother was Jun Hyug for the first ten-and-some years of his life, but renamed himself to Justin when he started the sixth grade after going through primary school with people who simply couldn’t find themselves capable of pronouncing his name correctly. My father’s name is Kwangwong. As someone who frequently engages in business with English as the shared language, he started going by Kevin. When you’re trying to assert authority as an Asian man in the United States with a heavy accent—no matter how fluent you are‚you’ve got to do whatever you can to appeal to your proximity to Americanness, or otherwise your non-other-ness. 

My mom’s name is Mihyang. She tried out Stella for a while, but never felt like it was truly her name. I get it. She’s not really a Stella in my opinion, either. 

I’m Youree, and only Youree. I never wanted an English name. I’ve always corrected people who say my name incorrectly. I love my name and I’m quite proud of my heritage.

I was in primary sschool when I immigrated from Korea to America, and became a naturalized citizen in my teens when my mother got her citizenship. There are certain categories for people like me: 1.5 generation Korean-American to indicate that I did not leave Korea as an adult, but was not born outside of my homeland. There are vast cultural differences between the first-generation and second-generation immigrants, and fairly little overlap socially.

Gyopo is an outdated (and frankly derogatory) term to describe the Korean diaspora that has mostly assimilated to the culture of their new country of residence, leaving behind that of South Korea. 

Having lived in London for just over a year, I’ve had to question my identity more than I ever did in my community back home in California, where I was always surrounded by fellow Korean-Americans who never asked me to define my Americanness or Koreanness. By all means, I have lived the vast majority of my life in America, but I was raised by Korean parents with Korean values and language. My soul food is Korean, because it’s what I grew up eating. 

My Koreanness is rejected on the basis of not having lived in the country for more than twenty years. My Americanness is rejected simply on the basis of being a woman of color—I will never truly be recognized as a peer and equal because I am not who America is meant for. And here, in the UK? Here, I am neither Korean nor American. Here in the European continent, the final boss of racist people, I am Chinese. Wo ai ni 🙏❤️

back to namul

To be honest, making work about my cultural heritage is inherently self-othering, which scares me. So many artists of color experience tokenization, being pigeonholed to make work specifically about their race, on the allotted Heritage Month of the Year. I’m doing it anyways, because:

1. I’m going to be seen as different anyways 

2. It’s important to me.

Asian-Americans have lived out the Model Minority Myth for so long, believing that if we shut up and perform whiteness convincingly enough, we will be accepted as “one of the good ones,” or even better, “one of them.” This is not only untrue, but generationally harmful in that it pits Asian-Americans against other minorities, namely Black and Indigenous people who have historically made their grievances known, advocated for themselves when wronged, and celebrated their cultures proudly. 

Korea exemplifies this behavior of being excellent in its outward projection, whether it’s in educational achievement, or being a leader in popular culture. Despite how mainstream Korean content has become over the past decade, there seems to be an erosion of traditional Korean culture that I want to preserve through this research. There’s so much to be learned from looking backwards at often painful and complicated histories, and so much to be gained from sharing them with future generations.

Thus, I’d like to make the distinction that the purpose of this research—this work— is not for the Western gaze, to educate and evangelize about the wonderful world of namul, but for myself, here in London in 2024. It’s for my future children (if ever they shall be), and for my ancestors as a thank you for their resilience and wisdom. 잘 먹겠습니다.

namul people

Namul tells a story that isn’t straightforward or single layered—it’s a story about resourcefulness in the face of blistering poverty, but also about impeccable taste and a connection to the land. Many of the plants eaten as namul in Korea are also native to Europe and the Americas, but aren’t seen as food because it’s toxic to eat untreated, or simply because non-fruiting parts of plants are disregarded.

About the endless hours of unpaid labor by women who foraged, processed, prepared, and served it for their families. About lost household recipes as Korea rapidly industrializes and cooks at home less and less. 

About seasonality and rituals around particular namul eaten to celebrate the twenty-four seasons in Korea’s jeolgi calendar. About the tapestry of language that exists around every part of the human relationship to namul, juxtaposed against the loss of nature related words in the Oxford Dictionary, replaced with words related to AI and other forms and uses of tech.

About nutrition—how Koreans consume the most vegetables per capita because of how widely namul is eaten, and how plant based diets are now recommended around the world for personal health as well as environmental and ethical concerns around meat consumption. 

i’m currently working on a research proposal for my work during my MA this year, and i’m not sure where it’s going or what the final form of my work will take.

but i’m interested in speaking to different people in korean diaspora to help guide the research, in calling my grandma, going gosari picking in the spring… turning every green thing into namul in the meantime.

not namul, but buchu from the garden made into yangnyumjang for 콩나물밥 i had the other day

This week’s post finds its inspiration from Sociologist Gary Alan Fine’s paper, “The Presentation of Ethnic Authenticity: Chinese Food as a Social Accomplishment”.

For an essay written in 1995, there are insights that are worth discussing today.

Through in-depth interviews with staff at Chinese restaurants, Fine examines how authenticity is crafted and experienced in these establishments within a mid-sized U.S. town.

Fine contends that authenticity is socially co-created by both the consumer and producer in an economic exchange. I’m writing out his findings and a few other things that I think are fun and interesting, hehehehehehehehe.

The full paper is fascinating and deserving of its own read, if you are interested in this type of thing. I’m not sure why you are here if you wouldn’t be.

Anyways, you can find a link to the paper here.

Authenticity as TRUTH!!!

Gary Alan Fine defines authenticity as “something that is accepted to be true to itself.”

This is already feeling a bit circular. How do we know that something is “true to itself”?

When determining if something is the “real thing”, when we ask the question “Is this true?”, we rely on a set of criteria—often unconsciously—that convinces us of its authenticity.

This mechanism, of course, varies broadly and is usually an approximation. The art dealer knows that such and such strokes are clearly the mark of such and such artist, a body builder’s physique is a sign that his workouts are producing the intended results, the excellent grade I received on a test is an indicator that I understand the material.

We’re convinced by these signs that it is telling us something truthful to some extent. Internally, we’re constantly negotiating without even realizing it.

Fine writes that the task of determining the authenticity of ethnic food functions no differently. Ethnic food in America being “true to itself” means that it is prepared “using the same ingredients and processes as found in the homeland of the ethnic, national, or regional group.”

The best example I can think of is your favorite childhood meal.

It’s surprising and wonderful that most of us are able to immediately know when it is prepared “authentically”, which is just a short-hand for saying that it is true to the flavors, ingredients, textures, and smells of what how it tasted—back in the day.

Sure, there’s a possibility that we might be wrong about what the dish actually tasted like when we were children, but like the scene from Ratatouille, our tongues have a hard time lying. It’s a type of knowing that transcends the murky waters of rational proofs and logics and presuppositions.

With a childhood meal, we discern truth by eating it, and this only works when you’ve had the dish before. You know the signs.

Americanized ethnic food, however, requires a modification of ingredients and cooking processes, preventing it from ever being “authentic”.

If authenticity in the form of ethnic food, let’s say Chinese food, can never be actualized in the US, why are so many people convinced that they’ve had the real thing, when they don’t “know” the signs?

Authenticity as Economic Exchange!!!

There’s a tension between what authentic Chinese food really is and the Americanized ethnic cuisine. For ethnic food restaurant owners, bridging this gap is essential to their financial success.

In the US, authenticity is validated when it is sold and exchanged as a product.

Chinese restaurant owners understand and carefully curate this economic transaction to convince the non-Chinese customers that their restaurant is indeed “the real thing”.

They give exotic names to their restaurants—Golden Dragon, Silk Road Kitchen, Lotus Garden—to create a hyperreality. The decor, the menu that only presents food that White people would enjoy, down to the little Buddha you see as you swing open the door are all things that restaurant owners do to convince you that what they sell is authentic.

People in the US who’ve never had Chinese food see and experience these signs, and what they’re buying is an alternate, reductive vision of the Chinese experience that’s been carefully curated to satisfy them.

Customers wrongly assume that authenticity is an inherent quality—like you have it or you don’t. They’re getting duped. They don’t see the invisible labor that goes into making it feel like that.

This, of course, only works because of what scholars call the Voyeuristic Gaze.

Authenticity as Identity!!!

When an American (anyone, really) enters an ethnic restaurant, it’s not just about satisfying physical hunger.

It’s identity work.

It’s identity work.

It’s identity work.

Scholars call this the voyeuristic gaze, “the internal desire of consuming goods outside the bounds of domestic life as a way to experience adventure”. Fine describes how the “construction of authentic food responds to the American quest for authentic experience and identity transformation”.

Furthermore, this unassailable belief in one’s personal identity as adventurous often clashes with their actual comfort level. In other words, just because you say you like ethnic food doesn’t mean you actually will.

Again, this is where restaurant owners are also WORKING to satisfy the customer’s physical hunger and identity-related desires.

Because restaurant owners have to prioritize financial stability over a cultural one, it is better for them to reduce their restaurant, their food, and ultimately their culture/identity in order to survival and “make it” in the US.

In the context of the US, so much of ethnic cuisine is still contingent on the satisfaction of the White person at the expense of the dignity of the ethnic person.

Story time.

My friend’s parents owned a local Korean market in Grand Rapids, Michigan. One day, this White couple ordered sul-lung-tang (ox tail soup), a Korean classic. To their dismay, they felt like something was off about it, namely, that it was very unseasoned. My friend recounts how they were struggling to eat the soup, and eventually started adding bimbim sauce to the dish to make it palatable to their tastes.

Eventually, they brought the dish to the store owners and complained that it wasn’t “seasoned” to their liking.

Little did they realize that the broth of sul-lung-tang comes unseasoned, and you’re supposed to season the dish yourself using the salt, pepper, and green onions on the dining table.

The desire to eat something “as it’s supposed to be” requires more knowledge and education than just eating it. You have to know how to eat it, and this takes cultural capital.

Access to this type of cultural capital in Michigan 2008 meant that you were Korean, had Korean friends, or had the nerve to go up to the Korean auntie and tell her that she made a mistake in a dish you’ve never eaten before.

My friend and I still laugh about this story now, but without the ethnic person putting in extra work to curate the eating experience, the voyeuristic gaze falls apart, they’ve failed to live up to their identity as an adventurous person, and they’re not coming back to your restaurant.

There are real costs. Ethnic people’s livelihood depends on maintaining the voyeuristic gaze.

You get the point. Food is always identity work.

Authenticity as Bounded!!!

Because culture is dynamic and always in flux, authenticity is always constrained by some aspect, like time, geography, personal preference, things of that sort.

I argue that the “essential qualities” of what makes food authentic is most intellectually honest after you’ve qualified your terms and boundaries.

For example, a lot of people think that what makes iconic “Kimchi” Kimchi is its bright red color that comes from red pepper flakes.

But this wasn’t always the case. In fact, it’s relatively modern.

Ji Hye Kim (at Miss Kims Ann Arbor) says in an interview that the emergence of Red Kimchi in Korean cookbooks “was only until 200 years ago”.

What many of us have taken as essential was at one point, unimagined.

This might seem unnecessarily picky (pun intended) to you, but because food is always identity work, I think people take things really personally and so they get really tense and frustrated when they feel as if someone isn’t creating something “authentic”.

It feels like an attack because they misrepresented you, like they got something about your identity fundamentally wrong.

My point is that before you decide to cancel them, I think it’s important to do your own research and ask questions in good faith to assess so that you don’t 1) make a fool of yourself or 2) fall into the trap of believing that your definition of an authentic “food” remains unbounded by time and space. Even the tiniest bits of humility and curiosity goes a long way.

This is also why I’m okay with calling Panda Express “authentic” in the sense that it’s authentically Chinese-American. Taco Bell isn’t Mexican; it never will be. And that’s okay. It can be authentically Mexican-American, and it’s really good at doing that.

This type of perspective allows food to exist without stigmatizing or insulting those who eat or don’t eat certain cuisines, and that’s a good place to start.

This week’s post (and many future writings) will come from Wendell Berry’s collection of essays titled, “Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food”. You can find a link to his work here.

And, as always, please leave a comment with your thoughts! We really hope to cultivate a community of people discussing and learning about eating—together.

***TW***: Language of self-harm.

It’s time to know the land.

Wendell Berry contends1 that modern, industrial agriculture has only one, blunt method of measuring its success: Are we being productive?

With innovation in one hand and market competition in the other, the answer to this question is an adamant YES.

Even a cursory glance at the infinite stores of food in Krogers, Costcos, Walmarts, Safeways, HEBs…you get the point. There’s a lot of food in the US, and this is what makes us secure. Safe. Stable.2 Bulk items represent this (illusive) human power to control nature.3

This might feel triumphant, but it’s short-lived and fragile. When you pull back the curtains of what’s “really going on”, Berry argues that the victory of Big Agriculture is, “to our inestimable loss, a competition against our own land and our own people”.

WELL, BUTTER MY BUNS AND CALL ME A BISCUIT!

We boast about global production systems, the ability to manufacture a-seasonal produce, all for an incredibly cheap economic cost. This, of course, is a victory, in some ways. Produce is bigger, lasts longer, looks perfect.

But when we peer into the actual lives of the people and the land, the costs are devastating. The alarming rise of PCOS in women globally, LITERALLY DIABETES, more frequent and more extreme weather disasters a la climate change, and somehow none of this is ringing a bell to major corporations or policy-makers.

The consequences of a singular focus on productivity results in a society hell-bent on engaging in self-harm.

Berry compares this industrial farmer to a specific type of person: the narcissistic yapper. The worst types of conversation, to me, are the ones where the other person is talking the entire time without ever considering your thoughts or giving you a chance to speak. It’s always about them and never about you. (Yes, set up an intervention for them, if you love them enough!)

These industrial farmers, Berry writes, “has never asked for anything, or waited to hear any response. It has taken what it wanted. This, clearly is a dictatorial form of behavior, and it is totalitarian in its use of people as it is in its use of nature.”

A small-scale farmer, on the other hand, understands that although productivity is an aspect of how they measure their success, they consciously recognize the “interdependence between themselves and nature that has always existed, and if they are to live, must always exist.”

The moral and human approach to agriculture, then, is to speak with nature as a conversationalist: to ask good questions, listen attentively, and co-create creatively.

What might make this terrifying to the industrial farmer is that a two-sided conversation requires a loss of control. Berry argues that these types of conversations are “always, to some degree mysterious, and requires faith”.

I’m convinced that what is missing is not necessarily more technology and more science and more streamlined processes, but the courage and imagination to view the land as its own living being, uniquely distinct but inevitably intertwined with our flourishing.

Do you see the land? What does it look like?

Do you hear the land? What is it saying?

One small way I’ve been practicing this type of conversation with nature is through baking bread.

I always hand-mix the dough because it is how I listen. Things like temperature, gluten development, and knowing that the salt has fully dissolved requires physical communication. I even consume the unbaked dough at every stage of the process because a good conversationalist is intentional and observant.

I also listen through my nostrils. The scent of my starter alerts me to its health. When I smell ripe bananas, I know my starter is happy to be alive; a pungent, overly sour scent is a cry for help. This exchange between myself and the starter is a dynamic, every-changing, never-ending process. And in every conversation, these cues of what is “typical” might feel stupidly simple and unimportant, but what is at stake is a matter of life and death. I wouldn’t know these early warning signs if productivity is our only measure. This type of “knowing” requires a deeper relationship.

So by the time a beautiful loaf comes out of the oven, yes, I’ve made something “productive”, but unlike the industrial farmer, it’s so much more than that. I’ve come to know nature on a depth where it is ingrained, a part of me. I know the land and how to use it well.

What I find perplexing is that the more I do this, I gain a greater sense and certainty of what the loaf will become long before it is baked. This is the paradox for me: Why is it that good conservations—which necessitate a relinquishing of control—often result in greater certainty?

I have a sense that embracing the mystery of faith allows us to truly know one another. A good conversation does this. People get vulnerable, emotionally and mentally naked. You see the other person for who they really are, how they are, and what they do. Somehow, then, there’s certainty without control and knowledge without insecurity. I think it’s appropriate to call this love.

Berry extends this metaphor by describing this love as a romantic reunion between nature and economy: “Farming by the measure of nature, which is to say the nature of the particular place, means that the farmers must tend farms that they know and love, farms small enough to know and love, using tools and methods that they know and love, in the company of neighbors that they know and love.”

There’s a discovering of who we really are and where we’re going.

It’s time to listen to the land.

a retrospective state of affairs from the table fables team

🥄 Sofie: Hi, it’s been a while — we hope you’ve been well and/or fermenting. I’m back in Japan, having just spent the last two months in the kitchen of community restaurant Harappa cafe. Now, I find myself (yet again) in the pottery town of Bizen, clothing stubbornly stained by ferrous clay, while attending pottery school for the month. After cheesemaking and goat farming in Vermont from spring to summer, I’m ready to embark on another journey in Japan, following wherever my next job takes me.

🍚 Hayoung:

I’m in TEXAS (for my PhD in Sociology and it’s going to take forever)! Many things are amazing and not amazing about Texas, but perhaps the most important and shocking fact I’ve discovered is about the price of flour. In California, five pounds of bread flour is around $12 dollars. In Texas? I’ve found 50 pounds for the same price…

🥢 Youree:

I’m wrapping up a 10-day trip across Copenhagen, Stockholm (again), and Berlin. It’s been good—I feel excited and energized to fly back to London tomorrow morning, get back to school and start parsing out my thesis proposal for the year. So far, I feel like it’s bringing in a lot of cultural identity exploration as a 1.5-gen Korean-American, and as always, involves the things we eat.

Currently Consuming

one thing we ate, one thing we read, and one miscellaneous thing that fed our souls this week.

🥄 Sofie

ate: The seaside town I’m currently living in, Hinase in Okayama prefecture, is famous for oysters. I tried this fried oyster soft-serve — idk what I was expecting, but it was almost a little bit disgusting 😂

read: finished reading 一汁一菜でよいという提案 (The Proposal That One Soup and One Side Dish is Enough), a book that promotes the minimalist approach to Japanese cooking, arguing that a satisfying meal can be achieved with just one bowl of soup and one side dish. It makes cooking accessible for busy lifestyles, and encourages readers to let seasonal ingredients shine using miso soup as a canvas.

misc: Here’s a snippet from pottery school: we start every morning with rajio taisō (Japanese radio calisthenics from the 1920s) and spiral wedging (kikuneri).

^Bizen pottery master demonstrating spiral wedging

🍚 Hayoung

ate: Eunice used to work at a sushi restaurant (as a server), but clearly she picked up some skills along the way. She made me these rolls.

read: I been reading. Lots. Like a lot a lot. Here’s one that completely changed my perspective on western society, another poetry book that rhymes well, another on micro-sociology interaction ritual chains, and I’m attempting Gilead by Marilynne Robinson for the third time!

misc: I’m making tons of coffee. These days, my “daily driver” is the hario switch, but sometimes I pull out the flair 58+ for an espresso shot pulled really long. I also made my own water, which, honestly, I hate myself for doing.

🥢 Youree

ate: this American style barbecue as the very first thing we had on our trip—most restaurants in Copenhagen were closed when we arrived, and we found a pub that serves one of our favorite breweries (Mikkeller!).

Something I’ve been thinking a lot lately as I enter my second year living abroad is that Americans catch so much flack from Europeans for being loud, rude, annoying, uncultured… and DON’T get me wrong—I’m far from a 🇺🇸🦅Patriot✊🎇🤠 but if this isn’t American food culture at its finest, I don’t know what to tell you.

Some might remember that I was a big fan of the Great BBQ Showdown(?) on Netflix and have a bit of a different appreciation for the craft of it all despite not really liking the food itself all that much.

This is less about food than it is about how people outside of the US love to talk about how backwards and ridiculous America is while being frankly narrow minded in their own right

read: running back the book of delights by Ross Gay for the millionth time because he is forever and always the blueprint

how to be a craftivist: the art of gentle protest in my ever growing attempts to embrace softness as strength and resilience

and I’m trying to get my hands on a copy of dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha to pore into it once I’m back in London. it looks like it’ll be a dense read, but I’m excited !! ty to hayoung for putting me on

misc: I’ve been hosting weekly dinner parties with school friends and i miss them every time we skip a week. It’s been such a joy to cook and eat (and drink and drink and drink) together so I’m happy to reconvene this coming Friday to finish off that oxtail we didn’t get to last time we gathered.

Ingredient of the Week: WHEAT🌾

🥄 Sofie: I can hardly count how many times I’ve made bread during these past two months, but here’s a snapshot of whats been going on. It’s nothing of the quality of Hayoung’s bread, but if we were a vector and his bread represented direction, mine would be magnitude. (i know this analogy doesn’t make much sense but i promise it was funny in my head).

🍚 Hayoung: I specifically asked for this ingredient because I knew I would shine. Here’s some bread I been baking:

🥢 Youree

Lillebrors Bageri in Stockholm has my mf heart… we immediately got back into line and ordered another pastry after pounding this LUSCIOUS donut and kardemummabullar.

Fun fact: fika culture is taken very seriously in Sweden—every company is required to provide its employees with free coffee throughout the day and therefore it has the highest coffee consumption per capita, as well as high rates of worker satisfaction (according to my tour guide from my first trip back in May)

Andy and I discussed how policies like this are great in theory but simply unscalable in a country as big as America because the world coffee supply is short as it is and we would run through that shiz so fast… So unfortunately, we must stick to hiding in the bathroom with iced coffee in our Stanley mugs to waste company time and develop a healthier relationship with our work.

“Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what who are”

I like this quote because, well, it’s true both physiologically and culturally.

The person into fitness is a really good example of this. Calories are counted and macros are obsessed over. Bland food is then boiled and packed into cute little plastic containers.

So we know what and how much this fitness-person is eating. But, as we know, this and all eating is also sustained by a vision of eating. This fitness person has bought into a vision of what eating will do for them, what is “good” for them, who they are now, and who they want to be.

We see what they are made of—lots and lots of boiled chicken and broccoli—but even if we can’t articulate it, we instinctively know that it’s so much more than that. It’s about an almost Lent-like, ascetic fasting for the “gains”, which is for a type of body aesthetic, which is for a type of sexual appeal, which is for…and on and on. You get the point. Food is always a promise to take us “home”.

I want to think about this idea from a different angle. Last week, my fiancée, Eunice, who is currently studying Art History, shared this passage about French dessert culture in the late 20th century.

“Even in the 1990s, customers in French bakeries could choose to buy têtes de negres, “heads of negroes”, hollow chocolate-covered meringues: heads, that is, without nothing inside…I was dismayed not only by their existence, but by the nonchalant indifference and sheer arrogance of the name itself.”

Here’s what one might typically look like:

There’s much to say here.

The cultural indifference to this act of eating should surprise no one, especially in light of the US election and the Israel/Palestine conflict. That is how history works, unfortunately. People normalize moral horrors, and it takes a truly courageous person to shake people awake to reality.

To some extent, I can understand what this type of food would do to someone. Labeled as a Twinkie (for being yellow on the outside and White on the inside), I learned rather quickly that the value of Korean-American identity was dependent on my performance of certain cultural skills that would allow others to perceive me as “Korean enough” and “American enough”.

The fact that Twinkies are cheap and made in a factory adds to the insult. I am easily accessible, nutritionally worthless, gluttonously-satisfying, mass-produced. This is what it means to be a Twinkie.

And then there’s the Cannibalistic part. I am literally called an object that is then eaten. My identity is reduced to an object that satisfies your hunger. My humanity—if you can call it that—is consumed.

At this point, some readers might consider all of this to be a stretch. Like, is anyone really thinking about Twinkies like this?

To these readers, I get what you are saying. My point isn’t to say that there’s a single narrative on foods that act as racial slurs.

Rather, my point is that food has a tremendous power that opens doors to worlds of belief and identity. Food gets us to believe things about ourselves we would have never imagined otherwise. The narrative I shared above is simply one of many pathways in how food might form our identity.

Maybe the fact that this all sounds so unbelievable (to some of you) is also the point. Maybe food, when racist, creates paranoia. I’m tempted to believe things about myself that are simply untrue. Rather than cultivating wholeness, the realms of possibility are about instigating my insecurity.

For a long time, I used to lament that racism felt so easy, that all you needed to do was reduce someone to stereotypes and caricatures.

Real racial reconciliation, on the other hand, felt too hard because it required a depth of understanding built on humility, creativity, and deep empathy. Is there such a thing today, or ever?

If only we could heal racism as efficiently as it seems to infect us, then maybe we would stand a chance.

These days, though, I feel differently about efficiency. I find comfort and joy in the fact that what is beautiful and true is not about efficiency but the slow yet steady work that moves forward. As John Perkins eloquently writes, “True change works more like an old oak tree in the spring, when the new life inside pushes off the old dead leaves that still hang on.”

True change requires time, collaboration, cultivation, and when the season is right, new life emerges. Most of us don’t get to see the Promised Land, and maybe that’s okay, because it’s bigger than us. It’s not about getting to experience what we’ve always dreamed of, here and now. Rather, our hopes rest on the idea that one day, a future generation will experience real change because of what we’ve contributed in our lifetime.

An immediate example that illustrates this “true change” was Edward Lee’s tteokbokki dish from the Netflix show, (Korean) Culinary Class Wars.

In the final showdown, both contestants were asked to create a dish that they could stake their name on. Edward Lee chose to interpret the savory Korean street food tteokbokki as a sweet dessert.

Unlike racist food, Edward Lee’s story of ttoekbokki was complex, vulnerable, and thoughtful. Just look at this aesthetic:

What really moved me to tears was his speech that HE WROTE OUT IN KOREAN (I roughly transcribed this here for y’all because I love you):

“I have an English name, but I also have a Korean name: Kyun. You could say that this dish was made by Kyun.

Whenever I ordered food from Korea, they always gave me so much. I could never finish it, especially tteokbokki. They give me so much that I would always have two or three pieces of rice cakes leftover.

I used to think that this was just wasting food, but not anymore. I know that the spirit of Korean food is about generosity, food prepared with love, and consideration for others.

This is why, today, I’ve prepared this dessert with that symbolize the leftover rice cake pieces.”

You really have to watch this clip because just reading the words here don’t do it justice. It’s not just his words that are so powerful. It’s his trembling tone, the trembling hands, the child-like Korean coming out from an elderly man.

What I loved the most is that Edward Lee truly changed. Lee used to think that the spirit of Korean food was wasteful, and this simple narrative could have easily remain justified in his mind for the rest of his life.

But something happened. I’m not entirely sure what it was exactly, but here’s what I do know. This man gets it.

His humble posture towards Southern cooking, and his willingness to give credit to the founders of the cuisine is quite rare in the restaurant industry where innovation and originality is idealized.

Or the Lee initiative, the non-profit he founded which seeks to make fine dining a more equitable, diverse, and sustainable endeavor. Doesn’t this speak to his ability to imagine a better world not just for those that “make it” but everyone?

I’m guessing that some of this might have bled into his wrestling with his Korean-American identity.

Alright, who tryna go with me to Kentucky to eat at his restaurant? YEEEEEE

Readers, does any of this resonate with you? Is there a food that made you feel small?

Better yet, is there a food that gave you dignity?

I’m Curious to hear people’s thoughts!!!

We hope you are well, doing well, and most importantly, eating well. If you’re new here, please subscribe and join us as we explore—together—how food permeates into history, place, and our sense of being.

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This week’s discussion: What meal was the most magical to you, and why?

We contend that food does something to all of us, and at its best touches us in a way that is beyond the rational, otherworldly—magical. Hayoung begins the conversation with a “treatise” on the difference between good and a great magician, and what food might have to do with all of this. Youree’s response continues to build on this, how food has glimmers or “seasons” of magical qualities, and Sofie hints at the idea that maybe what makes food magical is that it is mundane in the first place.

Have you ever thought about eating as magic?

Our mouths, as the magician, takes a material good and POOF, in a few moments, we’ve accomplished the most iconic and basic of tricks—to make something disappear.

Of course, the magician’s responsibility is to make sure that the thing that he’s made disappear to come back in its original form, and the inability to do so would be the beginnings of a horror film. (Imagine the magician that makes the woman disappear and being unable to bring her back—EEK!)

But eating is magical in the sense that we make the thing disappear, but unlike the magician, there is no incentive (or practical way, really) to bring back the item of food as it once was, but rather, the magic continues in how the object takes on new forms. Eating is magical not because it is momentarily invisible but because it is sustained transformation(s).

What I view as an essential aspect of magic is the (lack of) revelation. The performance of a beginner magician raises the question, “How did the magician do that without me knowing?” In these elementary forms, we know that the act involves deception, so we are amused but not astonished because it is a matter of skill and training. We know that we can “figure” it out.

But a great magician raises the question from mere lack of information to revelations of ontology. We begin to question reality itself, and we find ourselves asking deeply unsettling and destabilizing questions,

How can this be? Is magic real?

Almost instantaneously,  we are open to the possibility that there may be worlds and visions and realities that are beyond what we see, even beyond who are we, and that this belief in the impossible is not only a credible option but one that we have always desired.

Such is the same with eating. Most of us know to some degree how eating “works”. Something is consumed, digested, exited, and we live to see another day. Today, this understanding of eating is primarily clinical and scientific, so we use terms like metabolic, caloric, and dietary, which leads many to conclude that eating is something that we can *safely* control and conquer. We see eating as a good magician, as something that can be figured out if we just have the right information.  The magician just needs to tell us what’s going on.

My contention, however, is that eating is always the great magician, something that will forever remain a profound mystery with endless possibilities. The more the magician tell us, the less we know. We know eating truly but never fully, and the revelatory explorations we embark on to understand this act of eating transcends everything we have ever known about anything—even time and space itself.

For instance, the bite into the flesh of a ripe heirloom tomato is no longer about caloric intake or anything even about the tomato, but instead we are transported to infinity. Words fail us, and the only and best thing we can muster is smile. Or consider how the smell of a home-cooked meal warps time from linear destiny into a polygon. Suddenly we are eating and conversing with people who have gone before and after us. We are weeping and not weeping at once. A day becomes a thousand years and a thousand year a day. We are home again.

Everything becomes everyone all the time in every land through the transformative and magical act of eating.

i like this idea 

lately for me it’s been the idea of a sacredness/holiness about the business of food and eating, but i think magic, as you describe, is in a similar realm of otherworldly wonder and mystery.

i go through phases with this—sometimes the juiciest, ripest, most delectable tomato is just a tomato. other times, i’ll sit with a bowl of rice and feel that magic to my very bones. a few weeks i weeped into my kombucha, and wrote you guys a long email about fermentation.

i used to feel bad about it, as if my enthusiasm and interest in food only meant anything if it was constant and unwavering. perhaps I wasn’t serious enough about food to warrant any authority to speak, write, or create art around the topic..! hence a long drawn out hiatus for this newsletter 

a few days ago, a friend casually dropped this banger: “when you feel lonely, you realise it’s because you weren’t alone before.” (hi yuzu!) 

when it feels like food is just food—just a calorie just a commodity just a macro to hit—it’s a reminder and invitation that once, it meant more. 

and you can always get back there to that place of plenty, you know. you’ve been there before, and it’s never left. 

I think food is just as magical as it is mundane.

My friend (hi hiro) handed me a book the other day called 一汁一菜でよいという提案 which translates to: the proposal that one soup and one side is enough. It’s a book that lowers the hurdle of cooking for oneself, as the author posits a philosophy that we should be living on miso soup and a side dish/ rice everyday —not just your regular old bowl of miso soup with tofu and seaweed, but one filled with seasonal vegetables, constantly evolving day after day, inspired by the blessings of the land. 

It talks about how Japanese food culture used to be divided in two: food for the household (miso soup and rice) and food for the gods (everything else). 

And here at Harappa cafe, I see hiro’s mother Rika-san live that out in the most understated yet beautiful way. If I had to describe her cooking, it’s filled with warmth, humility, and thought for the body of the eater (体に優しくて心が温まるような丁寧な料理). She makes breakfast miso soup for staff members every morning even though she doesn’t have to, and it’s overflowing with seasonal mushrooms, sweet potatoes, kelp, daikon, tofu, and really any other vegetable found in the fridge.  For the buffet we cook for lunch, she always places her carefully and meticulously made dishes behind everyone else’s, hiding away in the shadows.

And yet her miso soup is the most delicious, heartwarming version of a miso soup I’ve had in my life. In that way, if you are what you eat, to have the honor of starting everyday with her soup has been feeling a bit magical on my end.

Enough yapping from us. We would love to hear from y’all on what foods and meals have utterly transformed your life, and we hope that there could be a beautiful sharing of stories that fill us up <3

So let’s hear it: In what ways has food revealed itself to you as a magician?

do you ever think about how good things take time 

and yet it's like a small mercy every time i stumble into my dark kitchen at the end of a long day and drop spoonfuls of miso into a pot of boiling water for a quick base for my soup, or when i can always rely on kimchi to brighten and lift a too heavy dish, or how a dash or two of fish or soy sauce is all i really need to make a stir fry come together 

do you ever think about how every step of a fermentation process is active, alive, yet mostly concealed from sight in unassuming and heavy lidded jars of clay

or about everything that had to align just so (time temp humidity), in order to create the conditions of possibility for that exact richness and depth of flavor that you experience so that the fermented thing isn't overtaken by harmful molds or otherwise just doesn't taste right

and you will never taste it exactly how it is at that very moment, ever again

lately i have been thinking about how our ability to tap into years of cultivated and fermented readymade products makes the process of cooking korean food at home so much quicker, with incredible delicious comforting payoff and how it's really thanks to people who have developed those techniques (out of sheer poverty and necessity) and the people who took the time to grow the beans or peppers or what have you and then go on to ferment them nicely and bring them into my kitchen all the way in northwest london so that i don't have to work all that hard to eat well. thank you to those people.

thank you, i guess, to the people who made gochujang a Trendy Oriental Delicacy so that i can walk into darn near any grocery store in london and find korean ingredients. we've come a long way, korean diaspora kids.

but i also think about how different it all tastes from grandma's homemade gochujang that i wrapped up in layers of clear plastic and hauled across the ocean and savored little by little, because grandma is old and i don't get to korea very often and it's the best gochujang i've ever tasted, miles better than anything in any grocery store in the world. besides, even if i were to make it myself, it will truly never taste like grandma's gochujang, fermented in heavy lidded clay jars on a balcony in busan for god knows how long under grandma's constant watch and care. 

anyways, would love to hear your thoughts on fermentation—cheese girl tap in 

cheese girl here, 

do you ever think about how people are fermenting? 

Last night, I was told a story of a baker in the countryside of Japan who would leave a bowl of steamed rice outside every night to ferment into Koji. That rice would grow different molds, and the good molds would be used in his bread. After experiment after experiment, he recalls, the best results he saw in his koji was during the pandemic. 

Environment matters. Even in the most rural parts of a mountain town in Japan, as the air in the neighboring towns became clearer, so did the koji spores. 

I am currently writing from my temporary home of Harappa cafe in Japan, where in the company of newly made friends and wild characters, we cook buffets of an undecided menu everyday. 

Something I've noticed in the past few years is that, when I start to become comfortable in a new space, I begin to propagate a fermentation station. It starts with sauerkraut -- low commitment, requires only cabbage and salt (2% of the weight of cabbage) ready in 2 weeks. I made two jars last week, and the one in the plastic container is starting to smell funky in a not not harmful way. 

I've also begrudgingly started a sourdough starter (thanks to hayoung's influence). I'll be leaving this cafe at the end of the month, so its fate is uncertain. These jars are now sitting under my kitchen counter, bubbling away, periodically entering my conscience. 

Do you ever think about how fermentation forces you to pay attention 

It calls for intentionality, for stability, and for humility

humility to not know 

to try to work with nature 

but really to surrender in the end 

Humans seem to arbitrarily call what benefits them “fermentation”

And what doesn’t “rot” 

But to be precise, fermentation is the process where carbohydrates created through photosynthesis, are broken down into sugars, becoming alcohol and carbon dioxide and benefiting us, so we call it fermentation 

In the broader context of the simple cycle of decomposition, fermentation and rot are essentially the same. to the ground we all return. 

When the fermented thing has strong vitality,  

even if it encounters harmful bacteria, it continues to live 

To those things, the fermentation bacteria latches onto, emitting the enticing smell of fermentation, 

inviting humans and animals for life giving consumption. 

That's the kind of person I'd like to be -- someone who is fermenting and inviting 

To be able to look outwards and serve others. 

But whether I'm fermenting or rotting 

it's questionable 

- Sofie 

Do you ever think about how fermentation is war and conquest?

How what we perceive as “good” fermentation—vigorous activity, lots of carbonation, the funk—is a wasteland of bacteria just battling it out for LITERALLY multiple generations? How we’ve made a multitude of moral decisions about which type of bacteria is “good” for fermentation and what’s not? How our lack of imagination and resistance to emotional intimacy allows us to call of this “biochemistry” and “food science”? How all of this culminates in our delight and consumption, and in our day and age, the digital consumption of our consumption?

The process [fermentation → eating → delighting] in these terms, is terrifying to me. I’m terrified because by I’ve failed to recognize that delight is a privilege that is only possible because of sacrifice. Fermentation requires war. Eating requires destruction. When I speak of sacrifice, war, and conquest, it means many things. It could be a war on eradicating hate, or the conquest of real justice in an unjust war. Or, like fermentation, it could be the sacrifices that span decades to bring about a healing in the new generating.

Delight, standing on these two shoulders, is not for the faint of heart. It is a serious responsibility that asks some of the most important questions anyone can ever ask in this life:

• How do I repay the debts of those who came before me? Is it even possible?

• And like cheese girl said, how might I prepare myself for a human “fermentation”, to become something that will bring delight to others?

“In Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats… They're eating... they're eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what's happening in our country, and it's a shame."

The BBC and the WSJ have thoroughly debunked these claims. Furthermore, the AP has confirmed that the particular video that went viral of the woman being arrested for eating a cat is not Haitian. In fact!!!!!!, Allexis Ferrell is a U.S. citizen and was BORN in OHIO.

Trump, like all bullies, relies on a single tactic to rally people: creating an outgroup by stoking fear and disgust. He needs a group to blame, and by reducing people to one-dimensional caricatures, he leaves very few opportunities for human connection and empathy.

Let’s break down what he says and what he really means:

“In Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats…

Translation: Immigrants are eating “man’s best friend”.

Why this is important: Because dogs and cats are so deeply sacred to American culture (think Old Yeller, Shiloh, Marley and Me, even Nintendogs), the only thing worse than eating a dog or cat is probably cannibalism. Out of everything Trump could have said about immigration, this tired stereotype is meant to ensure that Americans will find immigrants 1) disgusting and 2) incompatible with American values.

They're eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what's happening in our country, and it's a shame."

Translation: Immigrants are dangerous savages who don’t care about the law, and it’s going to bring disorder and shame to the United States.

Why this is important: By specifically mentioning pets, Trump is insinuating that immigrants don’t care about your property. Driven by some animalistic appetite, immigrants will break into your home, and then steal and eat cute lil’ Fluffy for dinner. Again, this is nothing new. Consider how black men were stereotyped as animalistic in their sex desires, and that NOTHING would stop them from making advances on White women. Or how indigenous peoples in the US were and are still characterized as uncivilized savages.

The first half is somewhat choir preaching. Most of you reading this know Trump’s antics well enough to push back on his insults and inflammatory rhetoric.

What I think is less discussed, even in progressive circles, is how notions of what food is or isn’t acceptable are still largely based on Western culture and diet.

I’ve seen a number of Instagram comments and posts immediately rush to say something along the lines of denial: “Trump is the worst. Immigrants eating dogs and cats is not true. It’s just a stereotype.”

Okay, but what if the stereotype was true? What if someone came from a country where their primary choice of meat was not beef, chicken, or fish, but dog or cat?

In other words, are you appalled by Trump because he’s factually incorrect or because you believe that it is unimaginable that someone would eat dogs and cats as part of their diet?

Unpack that for me fam 🤣

As an Asian-American, people ridiculed me with dog-eater insults, which, again, only works because dogs and cats are sacred AMERICAN symbols. And much to my shame, my immediate response was, “Koreans don’t eat dogs! It’s Chinese people that eat dogs.”

Growing up in Indiana, I understood the dynamics of the racial hierarchy and the language and strategies I would need to survive, even as a middle schooler.

I needed to put Chinese people down to lift myself and my Korean family above others. I knew I had to be the right kind of Asian immigrant, the kind that puts his head down, works hard, smells “normal”, gets good grades (but not too good!), stays quiet, and makes sure that no matter what, THOSE people are dog-eaters, but never me or my culture.

In a sense, I understand why Trump’s rhetoric is effective because I’ve used it for most of my life. I thought there was no way to have a conversation about these topics without fear or shame.

I’ve thought a lot about race and food since then. I’m at a place now where I’m trying to be honest and curious about the culture I come from. Yes, most people in Korea (like over 75%) have never eaten dog, but a minority of people have, and that’s a complex, ongoing cultural and legal conversation1, but I don’t think it warrants disgust or dehumanization.

So regardless if Trump is accurate or not in his view of immigrants’ eating practices (He’s not), the response should not be an immediate gut reaction to hurl but curiosity.

Seriously, eating practices are diverse and historically rooted. People eat so many unique and interesting plants and creatures due to circumstances like geography, poverty, religion, or even war, so before making a judgment, we should and must ask questions that show a posture of humility.

What do you eat?

How is it similar or different from what I eat?

And why?

The illustrations on packaging often hint at a charming, wholesome farm-like origin, where cows freely graze on green pastures, but that's far from the whole story. Feeding a country requires a massive effort.

Consider how much milk must be produced and processed to be shipped nationwide, that we may have the illusion of identical products reliably on our shelves, day after day. The final product is something as consistent a Big Mac.

The truth is, your carton of milk from the supermarket (unless otherwise specified) can't be traced back to one single farm.

This dawned on me one summer morning while making cheese as an apprentice at Jasper Hill Farm in Greensboro, Vermont. The soft cheese creamery (the FVC), kept at a sweltering 98 degrees, receives a truckload of milk—around 9,000 liters —every morning at 3 a.m. A small team of 4-8 then pasteurizes, cultures, and transforms the milk into four batches of soft bloomy-rind cheeses, sometimes working as late as 11p.m.

Russell, the milk truck driver, starts his shift at 1 a.m., driving to six different farms to collect milk in one tank before delivering it to the FVC. After washing the truck tank, he picks up another 9,000 liters of milk for the raw milk creamery (JHC) by 5 a.m. If this schedule sounds brutal — it is! But veteran cheesemaker Peter reassures me, "It’s in his blood."

The second truck, filled with milk from Andersonville Farm, is produced by 250 Holstein cows and is destined solely for making raw milk cheese at JHC. Every Friday afternoon, I spent five hours milking all 250 cows with my partner, each carrying around 75 pounds of milk in her udders. By the end of the day, our records showed we had accumulated 13,592 pounds of milk, all to be collected and shipped out by Russell, well before the next butt crack of dawn.

Back at the FVC, as the cultured milk is pumped into the vats through what could be mistaken as a firefighter’s hose, I realize that this milk represents the titanic scale of milk distribution across the United States.

Yet, in the grand scheme of the American food-scape, this is barely a drop in the bucket.

The scale of it all is staggering. The fact that a creamery receives 9,000 liters of milk each morning seems extraordinary—a whole world away from the 150-250 liters we’d fill our vat with at Ice House Farm for each cheesemaking of Sky Ranch Tommes.

As a five-year-old, I fervently dreamt of milking a cow one day (don’t ask me why, it eludes me). However, when that childhood wish came true, via machine milking 250 cows for 5 hours while covered in manure, questions about sustainability immediately arose — not just on the environmental front, but also whether this is truly a sustainable way to live day by day.

The cows are milked twice a day, at 1 a.m. and 2 p.m. High-producing cows never leave the barn because, as dairy farmer Bubba explained, “walking out to the pasture would reduce their milk yield.” Only the dry cows, on their 40-day break before being re-impregnated, see the light of day in the fields. As we mucked out the raised platforms where the cows stand, he explained that cows actually prefer staying indoors and eating pre-made feed rather than grazing on pasture. “It’s less strenuous for them, and their diet on grain produces more milk.” While it might be presumptuous to judge a cow's experience, I can’t help but have my doubts.

Typically, one or two people handle the milking, often covered in splatters of manure and hit by waterfalls of urine. It smells oddly of apple juice.

Is this really sustainable?

Humans have been milking cows since domestication over 10,000 years ago, but never on this scale. Andersonville Farm isn’t even the largest supplier for Jasper Hill Farm; another farm down the road has 500 cows. Yet even these numbers are minuscule compared to operations in other parts of the country. The USDA reports, the largest dairies in the U.S. have over 15,000 cows.

How long does it take to milk 15,000 cows?

That’s a trick question — on that scale, the milking never stops.

In such a dairy, a rotary milking system would be used in which the cows walk onto a slowly rotating platform. After the cows teats are sanitized with iodine, the milker attaches the suction units and the cows are milked while the platform revolves. When the cycle is complete, the cups are automatically removed and the cow walks off the platform. This is what makes large scale milking even remotely possible.

…

But what even is milk, and how did we get here?

To think of milk as just another food would be to ignore the galaxy we live in. Not just figuratively, but also literally.

Our word for galaxy has its origins in the Greek word for milk, gala —hence the Milky Way. In Greek mythology, the Milky Way was formed when Hera, the goddess of womanhood, spilled milk while breastfeeding Heracles. Each drop became a speck of light, known to us as a star — thats 400 billion stars worth of milk!

Aside from Greek mythology, milk finds itself embedded within creation myths across many other cultures. According to the Fulani people of West Africa, the world began with a huge drop of milk from which everything else was created. In Hindu mythology, the goddess Kamadhenu, a divine cow, produced milk that could fulfill any wish. In Norse mythology, the primordial cow Audhumla emerged from melting ice and sustained the first beings, including the god Odin.

The persistent presence of milk in our origin stories remind us that we once not only lived among, but depended upon, hoofed animals. “They were not only our food, but also our vehicles, clothing, tractors, tents, vessels, and musical instruments. They helped build our cities and grind our grain and carry our water. Their bodies formed the basis of so much of our early culture. Their skins became our first books.” (Kessler, 2009)

In today’s world, as dairy is reduced to a commodity, we often lose sight of its intrinsic ties to life, death, and the rhythms of nature. Milk is far from an ordinary product; it’s seasonal and it’s alive, teeming with a galaxy of microbes that make it a living, ever-changing substance.

As we meander through the woods and pastures with the goats of Ice House Farm in Goshen, Vermont, goat farmers Chad and Morgan point out the plants their goats particularly enjoy — ferns in the woods, wild strawberries, clovers, apple blossoms, and maple leaves right off the tree. Chad pulls down a large branch, and the goats eagerly gather for a feast. “The leaves from the trees are packed with more nutrients,” he explains. “They draw from a root system that reaches deep into the soil.” Some say that the goat’s milk tastes different from day to day, depending on what they’ve been eating.

Cheesemaking, in many ways, is the closest we come to consuming what the goats have been eating — maple leaves, grasses, clovers, wild strawberries, water, and the sun. In someways, when we cut into a wheel of Sky Ranch, we are eating not a cheese, but a meadow.

You are what what you eats eats.

Milk is a distillation of the land and the sun, it’s honest, and it belongs to the mammal. Often forgotten is that, just like humans, in order for a cow to lactate, she must first become pregnant and give birth. Producing milk is what defines a mammal. The class Mammalia, to which we belong, gets its name from the Latin mamma, meaning "of the breast”.

As we walk through the barns of Andersonville farm, in a dark room covered in wood shavings and manure lay curled up against the wall, a calf — a day old, tiny, tender, quiet calf. “What will you do with him?”, I ask. “He’ll be sent off on the beef truck in a few days, replies Bubba. “We like to keep them for a few days because we get a better price when they’re larger.

And just like that, Cheese is inextricably linked to death.

In more grim circumstances, Chad reveals, male kids are euthanized immediately after birth, a practice referred to as culling. On a dairy farm, only the females are valued for milk production, and the economic reality is that raising males is an expense without a return.

This is the sacrifice at the root of consuming milk and making cheese.

Cheese is made of 4 key ingredients: milk, starter cultures, rennet, and salt.

Rennet, the enzyme that coagulates milk to form curds, is harvested from the fourth stomach — the abomasum—of a young ruminant animal (cow, goat, or sheep). These are the very enzymes that help newborn animals digest their mother’s milk — babies are the original cheesemakers. (Ever seen a baby throw up curdled milk?)

Where there is milk, there is meat.

These animals are not to be pitied, but revered, for giving their lives so that ours may continue. The truest honor we can give these animals is to appreciate all of the meat and milk they give us, transforming it into something beautiful and life-sustaining. As the day’s milk is turned to cheese, the microbes in the raw milk ferment it, and then die, releasing enzymes that ripen the cheese.

As we carefully cut curds to make cheese from the milk of Chad and Morgans's goats, raised on their lush Vermont mountain plot, he tells me, “in today’s world, making cheese is one of the most anti-establishment thing you could do.”

And it’s true.

To make food in a way that heals the land is a subversive act.

In a country built on the monoculture of corn, where uniformity reigns, farmstead cheesemaking thrives on diversity. It’s not just about the goats and the plants they graze on, but also the pigs fed with the whey byproducts, the cows and chickens that share the land, and the unique microbes that reside in and flavor each cheese cave.

In a country where the government sets the price for milk, what could be affordable for large scale industrial farms becomes a high-blood-pressure inducing daily battle for small farms to stay afloat.

In an era of mass production, cheese becomes a celebration of how the world was made, in all of its wonders and idiosyncrasies. It demands that we engage with nature, observe the land and its inhabitants — the goats, the coyotes, the changing weather, their diet, health, and the nuances of milking — all the while considering these elements within the vat. Inside the vat, each batch of cheese is born of a relationship between the milk, the maker, and the microbes, within which all resides an entire galaxy.

This is obviously about much more than cheese. It’s about a view towards how to exist in this world.

Cheese is an extension of the land, livestock, and human culture, rather than something isolated from it.

So maybe, after all, we are to cry over spilled milk.

- Sofie

Gave me the space, time, and resources to be creative.

The kitchen was my place to stand,

To cook whatever the heck I wanted — things that have been on my mind, yet never thought I’d get around to making, due to of the lack of time and people to eat my food.

a few highlights:

• Yasushi tea time required that I make batches and batches of cookies everyday, and luckily, I had a whole list of cookies I hoped to make someday stored in my back pocket.

• Staff meals for 60! In the process of making different lunches and dinners for 2 months, I naturally ran out of meals to make out of my repertoire — to the rescue comes inspiration from NYT Cooking, YouTube, Instagram, and even dishes requested by staff members!

• Getting to know Micheal, Micheal, and Jaime while making staff meals together in pairs.

Cooking to this extent in quantity and intensity, day after day isn’t something I’ve had the chance to do before — my food life in college was a stark contrast, living off of boiled eggs, greek yogurt, and (my favorite) roasted Japanese sweet potatoes 🍠

Working in 3 different kitchens at 3 different price points rendered 3 different cooking styles —

1. (budget hotel) Yamane staff meals = big pot cooking: cooking for 60-70 in a team of 2 is a whole different ballgame. Makes you realize how many dishes are actually impossible to make in large quantities using 1 massive pot, 1 partner, 2 hrs, a faulty rice cooker, and not a single sharp knife, all while honoring everyone’s dietary restrictions: vegetarian, dairy-free, gluten-free, egg allergy— you name it. Every kitchen staff member went through a disastrous wet fried rice phase while adjusting to these constraints.

2. (midrange) Shimataya 8 course dinners: traditional Japanese food consisting of steamed egg custard (chawanmushi), a 3 part starter, entree, individual hot pot, sashimi, grilled fish, and dessert.

3. (boutique) Yasushi Breakfast + Tea time: I started as a kitchen hand cutting fruit plates, making muffins+banana bread, and setting up the breakfast buffets, but unexpectedly took over the chef position 2 weeks in.

The work was intense, often starting at 5/6am, sometimes ending as late as 8/9pm, followed by late night socializing and sleeping in places that weren’t my bed... I loved my job and all the people involved, but it certainly wasn’t the most sustainable lifestyle.

Yamane — possibly my favorite of them all

Cooking staff meals was definitely the most fulfilling, because I wanted nothing more than for staff to be fed well (even more so than the guests).

Living in a country far away from home (without access to a grocery store) what does it mean to eat well?

Main aims:

• Introduce Japanese home cooking to my mostly Australian (with a sprinkle of British) co-workers: takikomi gohan, nikujaga, yakiudon, katsucurry, steamed pork buns

• more fish

• Cook with as much local produce as possible (mushrooms, sweet potatoes, cabbage) from the michi-no-eki.

• Use the massive grocery budget on quality ingredients rather than cheap frozen meats + veg from wholesale Gyomu supermarket

• Make requested dishes for my friends so they might feel more at home (tuna mornay, mac&cheese, Indian fish curry)

• Ultimately, my hope was that staff would feel cared for through food

From chicken tikka masala to mapo tofu, a different recipe was tested nearly everyday for 2 months. As the weeks passed, I started being able to memorize everyone’s rice portion preferences, take note of the carnivorous guys that refuse to eat vegetables, the Japanese ladies in the office that request veggies, realize that the vegetarians are actually all pescatarian, and (big win) purchase fruits to replenish vitamin deficiencies via fruit salad (without a supermarket, it’s a dire situation here in this village).

Cooking in boutique hotel Residence Yasushi

Was a journey. Challenging no doubt, but it was one of the most valuable experiences that coming out of it, gave me the confidence to know what I’m capable of.

Early morning shifts at Yasushi started with setting up the breakfast buffet, followed by baking off a fresh batch of scones, and sending out made-to-order meals for approximately 40 guests each day.

The keyword of this kitchen was Junbi (準備) or preparation, starting from the day prior, seconds after closing the shutters of breakfast service. Those of the western kitchen culture might know it as mise-en-place.

Two weeks after my arrival, with the sudden resignation of the weekend chef and a gnarly snowboarding injury to the weekday chef, I was thrown into being the new full-time chef of this boutique hotel. With zero managerial guidance as to how to run service/the kitchen, nor what to make, I ended up simply making what I was comfortable cooking — things I wanted to eat. As some say, your strengths are your weaknesses vice versa, and I think this was no exception here — though the lack of guidance was daunting, it turned the job into one with the most responsibility and opportunity for learning.

• Japanese breakfast comprising of baked salmon, tamagoyaki, miso soup, a rotating flavor of onigiri, simmered hijiki, and namasu (pickled daikon + carrot).

• Kimbap day! With a side of kimchi, panfried sweet potato, sesame broccoli namul, nozawana, and shiso cucumber salad. Kimbap eventually fell out of rotation because it required that I clock in an hour earlier than usual at 5am to freshly roll everything up before 7am service. Sleep depriving the already sleep deprived is no joke.

• Steamed pork bun day with tea eggs and Taiwanese pickles was the most prep heavy — folding and steaming 80 buns the night prior — but the easiest to deal with during service since re-steaming only took 2 minutes. Also, endless buns jokes.

Drama 💃: At some point, we had a slew of French guests in for a week, who complained about the Asian breakfast menu, which lead the managers to require that I switch to western breakfasts every other day. ← a predicament I was not pleased about, given that I was promised freedom to make whatever I wanted.

And fundamentally, I think it’s crucial that the person cooking should want to eat what they’re making, care about what they’re making, and on the most basic level, know how to make what they’re making.

To quote the late Menahem Pressler, “love what you do”.

“They can’t stomach Asian breakfast two days in a row”.

To which I say, You’re in Japan — suck it.

But I obliged.

On the menu the next day were cornmeal waffles with berries and cream,

which theoretically sound good, but were a nightmare in itself.

Cut to solo waffle making for 5 hours the night prior, in the biggest tub (not a bowl) I could find, out of 9000 grams of flour,

only for most of it to be thrown away by guests…I had overcooked them in my ambitious efforts to make crispy waffles.

Never again.

Upon consulting my boss with an issue during my final week in the Yasushi kitchen, I was told, “You’re leaving soon, just let it go”.

So 🖕🏻western breakfasts were no longer, and steamed pork buns made a return.

Make what you want to make, ya’ll.

After the shutters closed post breakfast, Dani and I always took straight to prepping buffet items for the next morning: baking 4 banana breads + 2 batches of muffins, cutting butter pads, making yogurt parfaits, 1/2 batch scone mix, laundry etc. Main dish prep occurred alone at night (maybe slightly inebriated at times).

But in between all of that was the most exciting part: tea time sweets — a channel for creativity and an outlet for stress.

Amongst my favorite cookie experiments:

• Miso peanut butter (using local miso!)

• Soft earl grey sugar cookies with tangerine zest

• Miso dark chocolate

• Toasted sesame

• Rye dark chocolate chip

• Gochujang caramel

• Raspberry dark chocolate

• bonus: baked red bean nian gao

  Every cookie contained browned butter (cooled in the snow) and local flour from Nagano prefecture!

As the weeks passed, prep became faster and easier, standing in the kitchen during service became less panic inducing, and I began sleeping in my own bed again for more hours than 2.

Cooking in Shimataya

Felt the most controlled and formulaic.

It was Erina’s kitchen, and I was merely her replacement on her days off as the token Japanese speaker. She always prepared something in advance, menu planned by drawing dishes — the plates, the foods, and their arrangement — on a piece of paper, and lead in example in such a precise way, there was no question as to what to do.

She was the highlight of the kitchen.

Erina was also exceptional at making friends with the guests and leaving an impact through her food— impressed with her pickled vegetables, one particular guest even sent her a heartfelt two page letter, along with a bottle of honey all the way from her hometown in Australia 🍯

When I started my journey in Japan, I wrote in my notes,

“I find it odd that the people endeavoring to create the highest quality foods also seem to be those who are worst at feeding themselves ”.

Chad and Morgan from Ice House Farm — too busy contending with goats and cheesemaking to eat. By the time all the daily fires on the farm were put out, dinner oft rolled around at 10pm.

Ryuji-San, owner of Harappa cafe, who wouldn’t eat lunch with us after a whole morning of cooking up a buffet because “standing in the kitchen made him full”.

Giovanni, the Michelin recognized Italian chef + cheesemaker at Kumano Kodo Winery Guesthouse, who either ate scraps or nothing at all, after cooking fine dining dinners for his guests every night.

And finally, my dear friend Erina —

My biggest cooking role model,

Who is so knowledgeable yet under recognized for her talents and commitment to making good food with all her heart (definitely should’ve won best chef in Nozawa title imo), who imbues her cooking with kindness, who never comes down to eat staff meal because she’s “too lazy”, living instead on snacks from the next door souvenir shop, who inevitably will crave rice and natto in the middle of the night, and will randomly eat 3 pickled plums before sleeping, only to wake up with a puffy face —

You’re a star, Erina!

Come on guys.

(I should probably speak for myself)

But let’s eat well…

If cooking is giving, I think it’s just as important to know how to receive.

Food is only as good as the person eating it.

- Sofie

I apologize that for some of you reading this, LNY has already passed. As a Korean-AMERICAN, I (Hayoung) must be reminded often that the world does NOT revolve around us. Anyways, hope you had the opportunity to celebrate with loved ones.

Here’s the newsletter <3

Kitchen Dispatch

a retrospective state of affairs from the table fables team

🥄 Sofie

As some of you may know, I’ve been solo-traveling Japan through crafting & cooking for the past few months

• November was spent wwoofing at a hobbit-hole-of-a-community cafe , cooking daily buffets enjoyed by customers who pay what they like after eating.

• In December, I volunteered on a tiny goat farm/winery/guesthouse/cheesemaking creamery owned by an Italian chef. Daily tasks entailed cutting grass for goats, cleaning poop from pens, making cheese, cooking staff meals, housekeeping, and working in Giovanni’s fine dining-esque kitchen.

• January was spent working with a potter in Bizen, home to one of the six ancient kilns of Japan!

As of now in February, I’ve found myself working as a cook in the ski/onsen town of Nozawa, in 3 different hotel kitchens! Life lately has felt like a series of plot twists and side quests! 🤠 we be wildin’ out here

🍚 Hayoung

Currently surviving vibing in the Bay Area-ish:

• I am profusely ashamed to be reinforcing the Silicon Valley lifestyle, but I bought a used Peloton and averaging around 100 miles a week

• Started working at the first speciality coffee shop in Gilroy and making horrid latte art.

• Been making less-than-minimum-wage-money on twitter by posting NBA-related things. It’s been very fun (and time consuming)

🥢 Youree

Coming up on six months since I uprooted my life in California and moved to London.

frequently asked questions:

Q: Do you like London/are you homesick?

A: I love London. I would like to spend many more years here if not for the entire rest of my life (family, friends, lover) being back in the States. If I could find some way to immigrate them over, I would. I don’t feel homesick for the most part, but sometimes I am overtaken by the animal desire for an al pastor burrito with cheese, extra onions and red sauce.

Q: Do you have an English accent now?

A: No. I don’t think that’s how that works.

Q: Favorite parts about London?

A: Public transportation, walkability, access to travel across Europe, farmers market quality of produce at Walmart prices, the snacks the snacks, all the art galleries, student discounts everywhere… I could go on. I love my life here, actually.

Q: How’s the weather?

A: Better than I could’ve hoped or expected, despite the rainy week we’ve been having. I spend most of my waking hours in a well lit office building next to a big big window, anyways, and have a ten minute walk between my flat and school.

Currently Consuming

one thing we ate, one thing we read, and one miscellaneous thing that fed our souls this week.

🥄 Sofie

Ate: Homemade Takuan (pickled daikon radish, aka danmuji in Korean) made by my new crazy awesome kitchen friend, Erina!

Read: Lots/loads/heaps of recipes 💀

Currently cooking staff meals for ~60 people 5-6 times a week, and it’s actually insane. Before arriving, the kitchen was run entirely by two 19 year old boys, both of whom have no kitchen experience besides a short stint at dominos and a fish and chips shop respectively. They were thrown into the deep end feeding a ravenous crowd everyday, adapting to people’s dietary restrictions (vegetarian, pescatarian, gf, df), ordering ingredients every other day, and listening to people’s criticism, constructive or not. Anyways, I’ve joined the team now, and have been having loads of fun — its a creative job, and I feel much fulfillment trying to feed staff well. I’m not the most experienced cook, but thats what we have the internet for!!💃 Check out @sofgoatsfarming on instagram for pics.

Misc: In the village of Nozawa, there are 13 free public hot spring bath houses, and I’ve been trying my best to visit a different one every night after a long day of work. also hoping to cook eggs in the onsen water to make onsen eggs while I’m here!!

🍚 Hayoung

ate with my mouth: Had some pierogies and kielbasa in Cleveland while on a work trip

ate with my eyes: Harry Potter in Korean has been fun and exhausting, Kaplan’s Fragile Neighborhoods demands a re-read relatively soon, and trying to finish up R.O Kwon’s Incendiaries

ate with miscellaneous ears: Went to this classical surrealism concert last night and it was the worst experience of my life. Never again.

🥢 Youree

ate: So much BAO. I’ve loved the branding of this franchise from afar for years and was delighted to know that their food is delicious and reasonably priced. And they do free dessert on birthdays (happy birthday, YJ). If you ever visit, please get the dry aged rump cap and sweet potato fries.

read: Edible Economics: The World in 17 Dishes by Ha-Joon Chang, an econ professor in the UK from Korea. I’ve been enjoying the conversational tone of his writing, as well as the way I get to learn about food history and economic theory in one book. Definitely a niche read, but I think anyone can learn a thing or two from it.

misc: Barbara Krueger’s solo exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park, only a six minute walk from our main campus. For how renowned her work is (and how many pictures of her LACMA installations I’ve seen over the course of my life), I never learned much about Krueger until this past week.

She’s sharp and witty and iconic, and as I’ve been pondering what it would look like to be a designer who makes writing a big part of one’s practice, this exhibition showed me ways to meld in ever changing and evolving thoughts as the work itself.

Ingredient of the Week: Rice

🥄 Sofie: Takikomigohan 🍚

In trying to introduce

• Japanese foods to my mostly Australian and British colleagues

• Local, fresh produce rather than frozen veggies to the kitchen

• Rice that isn’t white rice bc I know they be tired of it

I made takikomi gohan (mixed rice), which is probably my favorite way to consume rice. Got to use so many beautiful mushrooms I found at the local market!! (bonus sweet potato rice 🍠)

🍚 Hayoung

I am attempting to make sourdough pretzels by NOT using rice but good ol’ flour made from wheat. Sorry.

🥢 Youree

I have been out of rice for a while and am scrambling to get through the open food in my flat before I leave for the summer, so I’m busting through my stash of grains (butter beans, oats, barley, quinoa) before I buy any more. We are coming up on day 7 with no rice in the house. Save me.

The original plan was to continue writing our joint newsletters to take you along each leg of our individual journeys, different as they all were, but life got in the way. Things moved too fast. We were trying our damndest not to break, and I refuse to feel bad about it. Now that I’ve had sufficient time to recover from the trauma of the past four months step away from my laptop and have some time to reorient my priorities, I came back to this newsletter. I want to keep sharing my practice with the people who have been watching and supporting me all along, also because I’m still rather crap at keeping in touch with folks through the long distance and time difference.

All this to say, my inquiries through the world of food have not stopped. I finally crossed make a cookbook for people who are depressed to varying degrees off my bucket list after a whopping eight years.

The term flew by and I really wish I had more time to work on it all, so I’m considering it a first draft and hope that sharing it now, a few months after its completion will give me new inspiration for how I’ll develop it further.

For now, here’s some bits from the beginning of the book:

Dear Reader,

Put simply as possible: I want you to eat well.

I’ve found that the most accessible and practical way to do that every day is to cook for yourself, and to do it with gumption, with relish, with delight. To lean into the ways that it forces you to take your mind off the rest of life’s demands and to simply luxuriate in the slowness of it all.

This is a hard ask—not everyone is confident in the kitchen, and after a long day of school/work/being alive, the last thing you might want to do is fuss and fuddle around in the kitchen.

After all, it’s never just the task of cooking, it’s the preparation and the cleaning and the plating and the ugh it’s just not worth the trouble—I’m not worth the trouble.

But I’m asking you to do it just the same, and I do it because I’ve been there, too. I go there often after a long, hard night in the studio or when I’ve been a really bad daughter, friend, and partner. 

Anyways, I’m asking you to give it an honest try, especially when you really don’t feel like you have it in you. 

I want you to know that in those very moments when you’re so unconvinced that your body is worth feeding good things and when you just haven’t got the capacity to get yourself to cook, when it seems like there is really truly no point to it all, I still want you to get yourself into the kitchen. Do the easiest version of the hard thing, whether that’s microwaving a freezer meal or making a bootleg charcuterie out of tinned fish and crackers.

There’s no single right approach to cooking. No single defined end goal of what is “good” or “bad,” except whatever your decide is good for you in that moment.

This is not a cookbook is full of recipes and beautiful food photography. There are no recipes in this cookbook because I am not a recipe developer nor an acclaimed chef, and furthermore, I do not know what you like to eat.

The only credentials I claim are that I was once deeply depressed and found deep solace healing in the act cooking, each meal becoming a practice in meeting my own needs. Now I am a little bit better at cooking and a lot less depressed, and this is a book I wish I had back then.

The prevalence of “food porn” and the highly aspirational tablescapes on social media may have led to unrealistic expectations of what it looks like to be a home cook. Not everybody has access to incredible kitchens, fresh seasonal ingredients, or expensive pantry items. You might be hesitant to claim that you cook because the food you make might not be all that photogenic, or you don’t think SPAM and rice is exactly the pinnacle of culinary excellence. You don’t mise en place like you’re “supposed to,” and you only ever season your food one way.

I want you to enjoy that SPAM and rice. 

I want you to notice the sizzling sound of oil in the pan, the little crackling and popping sounds when it comes in contact with that salty pink slab. I want you to keep an eye on it as it cooks, to watch how it changes color, and savor the bit of control you have over how crispy and toasty you want it to be.

I want you to drizzle ketchup or sesame seeds on top for no other reason but that it tastes good and you like it. I want you to get up mid-meal to fry an egg for your SPAM and rice because hey, why not? That oil in the pan’s not going anywhere.

I want you to be pleasantly surprised when your over easy egg ends up being scrambled because you didn’t want to get out a spatula and it turns out scrambled eggs work really well here, anyways. Cooking can be a low stakes task in that way. Isn’t that nice?

I just want you to marvel that you had the ability to make something that wasn’t there before, and that act of creation can nourish your body. You did that!!!

My hope is that with the help of this book, you to come to know cooking as less of a chore and more of an opportunity for contemplation and creativity. A way to be intentional in your self care by meeting your own wants and needs well. 

This book contains exercises I’ve adapted from years of therapy. Some may be helpful, others may not. I hope you can still approach them with an open mind, and revisit them as necessary. Feel free to work through them alone in bed, eating dry cereal straight out of the box or with a friend, perhaps over a nice warm meal at home. Self care has its limits, and I think feeding the people around you is the ultimate act of community care.

I care about you. I hope you are well, and I wish you a fun and tasty journey ahead.

Thank you for reading, for anyone that is. I hope you’re having a restful end of the year filled with excitement and anticipation for the new one to come.

This book gave me a lot of joy and catharsis to put together, and I’m hoping that before too long goes by, it will have gotten to a place where I am pleased enough with it to share it in full with you all.

I would also love to know if you would be interested in trying out the Life Egg exercise for yourselves. It was so much fun to see how my classmates filled theirs out, and we had some wonderful conversations about their family traditions and the foods that make them feel loved, the foods that make them gag, the little bits and bobs of their lives before I knew them that I don’t know how else I could’ve learned about. Take some time to read their answers; they are truly life giving.

Go ahead, draw a big egg shape on a piece of paper. Share some reflections and Q&A with your friends or loved ones. Maybe you can all get together and cook a meal to share while you’re at it.

I am flying off to Istanbul tomorrow, but with all the intention to write more frequently in the new year. Until then, all my love.

I hope you like, comment, subscribe, and Venmo me @ballamalla. Enjoy <3

Reading Minjin Lee’s Pachinko made me feel things, to the point that I’ve decided to publicly write about it.

For those that don’t know, Pachinko is a historical fiction novel spanning multiple generations of a Korean family navigating Japanese colonization in the 20th century.

The novel is thoroughly researched, with Lee spending 30-some years(!!!) writing the novel and interviewing over a hundred people for her quest to know “what really happened”.

You might be wondering, why so many interviews?

Apparently, she’s interested in writing stories about poor people, and because “people don’t leave documents”, oral history becomes her main method of investigation.

What emerges from her work is a kind of history that refuses to be silenced, whispering to the present moment that what once was still is. Hereditary diseases, PTSD from war, an exorbitant inheritance—these are the circumstances the characters in Pachinko never asked for but are born into.

It is these generational traumas and blessings that drive the novel forward, but only partly. Although history is always with us, it never comes at the expense of agency.

We forget that every decisive moment in history began with someone acting in a way “they weren’t supposed to”. Something can only go awfully wrong or right when people choose to go against the grain, to wake up one day and decide to be someone that everyone else thought they weren’t.

The characters in Pachinko are no different. They resist caricature and instead embrace paradox: morally upright clergy stumble into alcoholism, aristocratic men chase ordinary women, children “mature for their age” never reach adulthood. We’re really, really complicated.

Capturing these pockets of dialogue between historical legacy and human agency is Minjin Lee’s greatest strength. This is what makes her novels “work”. It’s in these moments that I felt seen and known, because I’ve experienced firsthand how legacy inevitably creeps toward me while I’m attempting all sorts of (un)remarkable things to subvert or make peace with it. She’s really good at humanizing humans.

I’ve titled this series “Eating Pachinko” because I want to write about food the way Minjin Lee writes about people—with depth, the courage to tell the whole truth, and most importantly, in love.

Whether or not you actually read Pachinko, I hope that the foods I will write about (mostly referenced from the novel) will inspire you to become:

• curious about how foods function as the intersection of historical legacy and human agency

• informed about how these (mostly Korean) foods matter today

• resist caricatures and settlings for simple narratives about food, people, society

I hope that this will be a collaborative effort as I research about various Korean foods and their histories.

We really do learn better together, and I hope that substack could be a space to not shut people down but to share information freely and generously.

Share these articles widely, so I can become famous and write about food as a living, but more importantly, to extend the discussion on Korean food beyond what it is now: overly simplistic and scientific. More than ever, we need deep stories and myths about the foods we eat!

The next post will be sometime in the coming week(s), and it’ll most definitely be about 미역국, korea’s ultra-super-duper-mega-iconic seaweed soup!!!!

Until next time, friends!

-Hayoung

a retrospective state of affairs from the table fables team

🥄 Sofie

Currently has no Internet access on account of a storm taking out the Wi-Fi (and apparently a lot of other important things). However, she has been spending her days at a cheese apprenticeship on a farm in Vermont for the past month, which she’ll tell you all about once we’re back to regularly scheduled updates. We hope. Stay alive and well out there, Sof!!!

I’M BACK. And yes, since graduating from college in June, I’ve relocated to Ice House Farm in green hills of Vermont to embrace the goat farming-cheese making life. It’s a 1.5 month long cheese apprenticeship (my dream come true) made possible by the Anne Saxelby Legacy Fund, and let me tell you, it’s been nothing short of incredible.

I never want to leave.

Every morning, we milk ~75 goats, take them out to pasture through the forest to graze all day, move electric fence while being attacked by an angry swarm of mosquitos in sweltering heat, retrieve the goats in the afternoon, milk again, and finally return them to the barn for the night. Somewhere in between all of that, we make kefir, yogurt, chèvre and hard cheese, visit the cheese caves to take care of the aging wheels, pack orders, make deliveries, feed and water all of the other animals on the farm, and in general, make sure that the farm doesn’t implode from daily disaster.

Oh, and we manage to fit in maple Creemees once in a while too (I’m in the process of making a creemee ranking for all of the spots we’ve visited)! When the day all comes to an end, around 9pm, we cook and sit down for dinner, capping the night with some Ted Lasso/Studio Ghibli on the couch. Sharing food has obviously been a highlight, but I’ve love every moment of being here.

I am constantly amazed by the beautifully rich lives that Morgan and Chad live with their ~95 goats on this farm/creamery that they’ve built from ground up themselves.

🍚 Hayoung

Well, in a series of rather unfortunate events also known as a family crisis, I’ll be living in Gilroy, CA for the next year. It’s unexpected and maddening, but also kinda funny? Like did you know that Gilroy is the garlic capital of the world and now I’m living here? Hilarious, right? I’m trying to make the most of it, so hopefully that means lots of Garlic, Galettes, and Gilroy glamour.

P.S. Our house also has a lemon tree.

🥢 Youree

I’m down to my last month in the States before my big move, so it’s been alternating weeks of spending time with people I’ll miss and recovering with an empty calendar and a book in bed. This past week I was in SF for a wedding (congrats, D&J 💓) trying my best to stay present, to love my people well, and eat all the Asian food I can get.

It only hit me recently that my life will look drastically different going forward and I am experiencing some big feelings about it as evidenced by the little sobfest I had on the drive up from LA, thinking about how much farther I’ll be from my beloved Bay Area once I’m in London.

Currently Consuming

one thing we ate, one thing we read, and one miscellaneous thing that fed our souls this week.

🥄 Sofie

ate: On Sunday morning, Morgan made me biscuits and gravy, her comfort food. Her grandma in Oklahoma made them for her, and so did her mother. I think there’s something really special about sharing comfort foods.

Comfort foods are dishes eaten for an emotional boost. They invoke feelings of familiarity and being cared for — It’s a way to feel like you’re with family when they’re not physically present. And now, through biscuits and gravy, it almost feels like a warm welcome into the household. At least that’s how I feel about cooking my comfort foods for people — it’s a special thing reserved to share with special people

read: Goat Song: A Seasonal Life, A Short History of Herding, and the Art of Making Cheese

Apparently, this is the book that inspired Morgan and Chad to get two goats in the first place!

“Goat Song is the story of a year in the life of a couple who abandoned their one-bedroom apartment in New York City to live on seventy-five acres in Vermont and raise Nubian goats. In poetic, reverent detail, Brad Kessler explores our ancient relationship to the land and our gradual alienation from the animals that feed us. His fascinating account traces his journey of choosing the goats and learning how to breed, milk, and care for them. As Kessler begins to live the life of a herder, he encounters the pastoral roots of so many aspects of Western culture—how our diet, our alphabet, our religions, poetry, and economy all grew out of a pastoralist setting, a life lived among hoofed animals.”

I coincidentally came across this book while perusing through a bookstore in Burlington on my day off, and after reading for about an hour in the store, I figured, I should just take it home to finish. So far, I’ve been enamored by how uncannily similar his experiences amongst goats in the greenery of Vermont has been to mine — it almost feels like reading a diary about yourself.

misc: Blueberry picking with Morgan

Just 5 min away from the farm is Blueberry Hill, property owned by the national forest, where locals are free to pick blueberries to their hearts’ content during the summer seasons. The sloped fields of blueberries and raspberries are surrounded by hills and hills stretching towards lake Champlain and New York. It almost seems unfair to be able to live so close to such a beautiful place.

Lemon blueberry ricotta cake, blueberry pie, blueberry compote drizzled over Chèvre cheesecake — great things are on the horizon.

🍚 Hayoung:

ate with my BIG MOUTH: There’s something about a painful season of life that makes it hard to eat. Anxiety does a really good job of knotting up the stomach, but it’s more than that.

I realize that I actively rejected the urge to enjoy food because I wanted to stay sad. The joy from food felt inappropriate, like I wasn’t allowed or deserve to feel good. Sometimes it felt like food was mocking me, reminding me of what I don’t have the capacity to feel at the moment.

And then came the espresso tonic.

I started making it a few weeks ago, and I am literally waking up for the sole purpose of making one for myself each day. When I take a sip of this fizzy, sweet, bitter, and citrus-y drink, I feel happy and more importantly, I let it happen.

ate with my WELL PROPORTIONED EAR:

Jon Bellion came out with a cover of Switchfoot’s “Meant to live”, and the lyrics offer words to describe why the espresso tonic phenomenon works for me:

“We were meant to live for so much more

Have we lost ourselves?

Somewhere we live inside

We want more than this world's got to offer

We want more than this world's got to offer

We want more than the wars of our fathers

And everything inside screams for second life”

I know this might sound awfully strange, but the espresso tonic was able to find me in the “somewhere inside”. I feel like me again when I drink it. I remember who I am.

ate with my SINGULAR EYEBALL:

I recently finished Patrick Sharkey’s Uneasy Peace, a non-fiction work describing the rise and decline of crime in the United States. Because it was written in 2017, it was interesting to see both the prophetic nature of his projections (US safety perception is deeply fragile and will be impacted by black men dying at the hands of police brutality for everyone to see on social media—> George Floyd) but also how he really couldn’t expect a pandemic to show up in 2020.

I’m going to be closely following his scholarship from now on.

There’s also a chapter detailing the important work of community organizations that work tirelessly to ensure that their children have the opportunities to grow up safe, empowered, and educated. In particular, I was inspired by an organization that created community gardens that eventually started to sell their produce at the farmer’s market.

I hope if you are reading this, you have that inescapable conviction that there is so much work to do in healing our land, and that we must do this together.

🥢 Youree

ate: The most special anniversary dinner at Angler, next to the ferry building. Everything was so beautiful and delicious, with ample portions for two. I can’t stop thinking about the hen of the woods grilled mushroom and individually grilled scallops with butter sauce, as well as the jasmine tea-based cocktail I had.

Also, the older Asian couple that was also pregaming with oysters at Hog Island Oyster Co. right next to us were also seated behind our table for dinner. A silly little multiverse moment that made me ponder how Andy and I will look back on this meal once we’re also middle aged with many more anniversaries and fancy restaurants under our belts. I hope we can keep dressing up extra fancy and get excited when we debrief about the bathroom decor and order extra champagne and never take any of it for granted.

read: Mommy, Baby, Tyrant, Serf: A new paradigm for love by Julia Golda Harris for her newsletter, Dyke Domesticity.

This is not food related whatsoever, but I would be amiss not to include it as my “thing read of the week” for how much good conversational content I got out of it this weekend. The idea is that within a given relationship, each party will fall somewhere along these axes. Your placement can change depending on the relationship, but it proves a good framework for understanding why I’ve always felt more “myself” in certain friendships or community settings than others.

I’ve always had this take that your closest friends are the ones who shape the way that you receive love. Of course, it’s very tied to the way that you were raised by your primary caretakers when you were a child, but chosen family feels more significant to me. These are the people you surround yourself with, and allow to influence your life even as an adult with agency to decide who you want to spend your time and resources with, or even at all.

I have the capacity to be nurturing and anticipating of people’s needs. Some people radiate such strong Baby energy to me that I sequester myself farther along the vertical axis into Mommy territory because I am a people pleaser that is still trying to learn boundaries. 💪💯❤️‍🔥 I am also somewhat of a control freak when it comes to group projects and hate wasting time on delegating tasks so I take up the mantle and am often seen as someone who is a leader and perfectionist and generally knows what they are doing but to be honest all of my closest relationships where I am allowed to be Baby give me reprieve from a world that makes me Mommy against my will.

Harris writes, “What’s fun about the framework, I think, is that each quadrant sounds kind of insulting, and therefore all four are neutralized.” And it is true. There is nothing inherently against being a Mommy because frankly they make the world a much better place, but if I were to further complicate this entire ordeal, Mommy energy is peak Enneagram 2 behavior as someone who wants to help and serve and feel needed, and as a Type 4, it is typically indicative that I am not in the healthiest place when I am acting like a 2.

“You and your categories” -Andy Chon

misc: Home is where the homies are, and the homies are at [redacted address] in San Francisco. Three of my nearest and dearest college friends live together in a big, beautiful house in South SF, with a massive window in the living room and the world’s coziest couch right below it. There’s a thriving basil plant in the windowsill, wedding invitations on the fridge, Lois’ sewing machine on the dining table. There’s Dominic’s physical therapy exercise bands near the TV and Cleb’s pile of cooking ingredients on a shelf. Charles and Jan have moved out since getting married, but there are still memories of eating concord grapes on the carpet and tasting homemade canelés and chit chatting the night away that all made my heart feel so nourished this past week.

There were two more spare rooms in the house but it is always nice falling asleep in the same bed as Lois. We have traveled enough and spent enough nights visiting to know that she is a deep enough sleeper that she won’t be woken when I go out to the living room early. Dom is an early riser, always been. It’s a comforting sight to meander out to see him sitting in the sun, click clacking on his laptop with his Bible on the coffee table because that’s when he likes to have his quiet time, first thing in the morning.

Dom cut me fresh farmer’s market fruit every morning while Lois and Andy slept in, and I had this overwhelming feeling of understanding how my mom must’ve felt every time we visited Grandma’s apartment in Korea where she grew up.

I feel like my idea of home will only continue to grow more fractured as time goes by, life stages change, and we get older, but I’m going to hold this past week close to me. Maybe I’ll take my kids to visit the house and say it was where my parents lived, too (lol)

Ingredient of the Week: Free for All ✨

🥄 Sofie: homemade goat ricotta

Last week, Vermont was hit by massive storms and disastrous flooding that has wreaked absolute havoc on some of the farming communities here. As the storm rapidly came in, we even saw a tiny tornado begin to form over our little farm house! Awesome but frightful stuff.

When the weather took out our power, water, and wifi, we happened to be in the middle of making ricotta!

ricotta making 🤝 headlamps

This single batch of ricotta has proven to be quite a lot, as we’ve made a range of treats and meals with it, but have barely made a dent in the container.

Here’s the lineup so far: cheesy herb babka, blueberry lemon ricotta cake, and cheeseboard/silver (for you Berkeley acquainted people) inspired pizza.

Leave a comment if you have suggestions for what we should make with the rest of the ricotta!

Bread burnt in the toaster oven. But it was still delicious.

This pizza has almost every cheese imaginable on it. Feta, cheddar, mozzarella, tomme, ricotta, and chèvre, half of which were made on this farm. The pizza crust even has our farm goat milk in it, milked out only an hour prior!

Starting the day off right with blueberry lemon ricotta cake with coffee for breakfast Ft. the blueberries we picked yesterday!

Hayoung: GLUTEN

A few months ago, Teoh introduced me to this thing called “Barbeque Gluten”, which tasted like a rubbery, slimy chicken tender slathered in BBQ sauce. It was unfamiliar, but after a few bites, I really enjoyed it!

After doing my own research, apparently this is called Kaomianjin, which is a type of grilled noodle commonly served in Xi'an, China. It looks far more appetizing on the grill. I bought it again at Ranch 99, and the Chinese cashier looked at me dead in the eye and said, “Very good taste! It delicious”. It doesn’t get better than this, does it?

🥢 Youree

I kept crying every time I thought it would be my last time seeing Alice before I left so they arranged one last special visit for lunch as a surprise before we drove back down to LA 🥲

House of Pancakes in the Sunset!! Lois thought each skewer order was one (1) skewer so we ended up with 16 skewers. Green beans are a must order, as well as the lamb pancake and shrimp dumplings. If you’re ordering this much food, just go ahead and get two orders of green beans. You won’t regret it.

Bonus: Andy gifts me a special chocolate bar every month, and this one from Chuao is probably one of my favorites. It has pop rocks inside, which are a fun surprise if you aren’t expecting it, and even more fun when you are Dominic and grew up a wholesome Davis boy who has never had pop rocks before.

That’s all for this week 🥣

We hope you’ve been well, too. Write back in the comments or directly in the inbox if you please! The hope is always to stay in touch.

Tell us what’s been on your mind, or what tasty things you’ve been eating.

Are you a Baby Serf, or a Mommy Tyrant? Who brings out each quality in you?

What other applications of ricotta have you seen? What is home to you?

All the good stuff! Be well.

Kitchen Dispatch

a retrospective state of affairs from the table fables team

🍚 Hayoung

I’ve been in Korea for one month now. I am mentally preparing myself for hotter, more humid days. Far more importantly, the NBA Finals is now over, with Nikola Jokic establishing himself as the greatest player in the association currently. Go Nuggets!

(Also, someone should write an essay on the rise of analytic-based nutrition in the NBA in contrast to the “junk-food diets” of Allen Iverson. A few months ago, there was some tension between these two diets a la Anthony Edwards and fort-nite prodigy Karl Anthony-Towns.)

Just remember, food is always present in these discussions. <3

🥢 Youree

Had a little family vacation in Big Bear for an early Father’s Day celebration, where we ate, drank, and were generally very merry, besides the allergies kicking our teeth in. I drove a boat! We taught my parents how to play Sequence! Andy grilled a bunch of meat and my sister in law made some good ass breakfast sandwiches!!! My dad talked about how the first time we came to Big Bear, we ate curry and ramen because even the lodging was so expensive and he couldn’t even dream about renting a boat or dropping a crispy hundo for the winner of game night but look at us now! Back then he had to do everything for our family but now he gets to sit back and enjoy the rest while his kids and their partners plan things and buy groceries and pour him wine.

He told me, “I still don’t think I’ll be able to afford a boat of my own in this lifetime, but I feel proud that I’ve set you guys up so that if you really wanted to, you could. Just let me ride your boat from time to time.”

I cried. Love you to pieces, Kev!!!

Currently Consuming

one thing we ate, one thing we read, and one miscellaneous thing that fed our souls this week.

🍚 Hayoung

Eating Well, I did done the deed. I ate at a Korean Costco. Here’s what I had:

• Mushroom soup:

  • Very mushroomy. Creamy. A variety of mushroom chunks. This is everything you want in a mushroom soup: texture, flavor, depth. It did need some salt though, so I give this a 8/10

  • FYI, Korea almost always has a dine-in option, where they give you an actual plate and utensils.

• PORK bake:

  • AYO WHAT WAS THIS? A chicken bake is known for its huge chunks of breast, burn-your-mouth Caesar dressing, tiny lil’ bacon crisps, all lovingly wrapped in a cheese-covered bread. This wasn’t that, chief. The Korean pork bake had thinly sliced marinated pork with a heaping amount of mozzarella as the filling. It was pretty much the baby of a calzone and philly cheesesteak. If this was a food item that was created on its own terms, this would easily be a 10/10. But no. This is a failed interpretation of the magnificent chicken bake. -10/10. I hate you.

• Hot dog:

  • This wasn’t good. Too salty (somehow!), and the bread was all wrong. I think it was missing…the POWER OF FREEDOM. GO AMERICA. The drink choices are far more superior here (why does Costco still have Powerade?), so I’m giving this a 8/10.

Reading

This week I’m reading Writing Self Writing Nation, which is a collection of essays on the book Dictee.

I’m learning a lot about the erasure of Korean history.

For instance, did you know that there were many Korean deaths when the US bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Because Koreans were conscripted into work by Japan until 1945, the US bombing ended up killing 48,000-50,000 Korean people.

I’ve asked a couple of my Korean friends (albeit Korean American), and they never heard about it. The more you look into it, the more you realize that it’s (intentionally) forgotten history, but we have to remember.

If you’re interested in the politics of Korean food such as the race (against Japan) to claim the superfood Kimchi, and the acceptance of Korean food by Western society and the globe overall, check out this book.

🥢 Youree

eating An Everlasting Meal type sitch: Leftover kimbap from Friday night’s dinner became the next day’s lunch after giving it a good coat of egg and pan frying to reheat it (Never leave kimbap out at room temp overnight if you care about your digestive tract).

Followed by leftovers from Saturday night’s dinner for Sunday morning breakfast. I used the remaining steak, kimchi, butter, and instant rice to make kimchi fried rice, adding soy sauce from the pickled veg for flavor. We also had 3 portions of potatoes roesti left that amounted to a full sized one that reheated beautifully.

The idea of an everlasting meal is so appealing to me—in which you take the leftovers of a meal and incorporate them into your next. Tamar Adler writes about it so beautifully and practically in both her books on the matter, walking you through ways that you can also salvage stems and sauces and give them new life.

reading A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness. My loan is due in 2 days and I have made woefully little progress, so I intend to set apart some time today to pound through it. I really missed the feeling of losing myself in a good fiction book. I read The Cloisters by Katy Hays last week and it left me feeling such a void inside (dark ending, think The Menu) that I felt the need to find something else to latch onto that could have some more continuity. Longer books, books in a series. It’s fun to be reading fiction again because my usual go to genres are cookbooks and books about Christianity, and sometimes I need something that won’t make me so existential!!!

misc My dear friend Alice was in town for a hot second and made time to visit little ol’ me after traveling to Mexico and Japan back to back for a month. And she brought me gifts! The cutest linen tote with tomatoes printed on them, and little matcha/hojicha goodies that I have been savoring since. I’m sure you can tell by the last newsletter that I’ve been in a big fat I miss my friends mood that has lifted a great deal since.

I love a little gift, because it is so nice to be known and so nice to be remembered. So nice to remember Alice and my farmer’s market heirloom tomato obsession when she stayed with me last summer. So nice when my friends bring me figs during fig season because I spent all of college not being able to afford them, and felt so grown up when I bought a big basket every week once I got my first job. So nice when my friend sends me photos of flowers or his nephew after we haven’t talked for months because those things make me happy. Or when I am sent a link for a dress that I had my eye on that was marked down 50% off a year later… A little poem or a leaf, a packet of poppy seeds. Pearl barrettes and stickers. A package of stationery because I love to write letters. I am happy to spend this time reflecting on these ways I have been loved tenderly, and loved on purpose. I hope that I can do the same for my friends, as well.

Ingredient of the Week: Nothing!

There is no Sofie, therefore there is no ingredient of the week because she is mostly the one who actually makes something with said ingredient every week.

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a retrospective state of affairs from the table fables team

🥄 Sofie

It’s the last week of college before finals week, but more importantly, there are 3 days left to my time at the UC Davis craft center. I’ve been neglecting schoolwork and bouncing between studios from morning to night like a maniac. Ceramics, screen printing, glass, jewelry, dye lab , textiles — we’re crafting with maximum efficiency.

🍚 Hayoung

Well, this past week I reunited with my friends who(m) I haven’t seen in over 10 years!!! We immediately went to a sauna, saw each other naked, and scraped the bacteria off each other’s backs. We stole came back home with our sauna-given-clothes on, and I’m excited to model this for y’all in the States.

🥢 Youree

Had an absolute whirlwind of a week with project deadlines galore. Spent some quality time unwinding from the madness with friends at supper, friends at home. In the nature hiking around Griffith Park with Andy, and going to MIAN again.

Currently Consuming

one thing we ate, one thing we read, and one miscellaneous thing that fed our souls this week.

🥄 Sofie

Making feeds my soul like nothing else.

Here’s what i’ve been working on for the past few days.

🍚 Hayoung

Eating This week, I’m on the East coast of Korea, and we’ve been eating lots of fish (again). Here’s a pic of fish I haven’t posted on IG yet. (You’re welcome!)

Reading I read this Substack essay on home, and it’s also a video documentary! I’m not sure how I found Taegan (I really don’t understand how substack algorithm works), but this essay has been really interesting for me as he unpacks the meaning of home through different languages like Old English. Check it out folks!

Also, I work at a non-profit where we give small seed grants to people who care about their community and want to do something about it. We just finished our final grant application, and I’ve had the delight of reading over everyone’s mini-grant application and the results from their program. Big dreams feed me to dream big!

🥢 Youree

eating a big plateful of deliciousness from our twelve person dinner last Wednesday. Here you see a radish salad (pre caesar dressing), and grilled pork chop with calabrian chili relish and charred cabbage with an Italian salsa verde. Paired with some scrumptious conversation with new friends and good ass natty wine.

Thank you to my dear friend Eunice for taking such nice photos with her Samsung phone’s superior low-light camera while Andy and I ran around serving folks. I will write a solo post on this soon

reading Thinking & Eating: Recipes to Nourish & Inspire by The School of Life, which in its entirety may as well be titled The Table Fables Manifesto. There’s a chapter about making conversation that I find incredibly profound, and also directly inspired the conversational menu I made for the aforementioned dinner along with each course:

There is broad agreement that every great meal should be accompanied by an equally great conversation. Talking over food is one of the central pleasures of civilisation. (…) Learning the art of conversation is no more difficult or impossible than learning the art of cookery. We simply need to wake up to the need to do so and take a few steps toward becoming better speakers and better listeners. Improved chat begins with a newfound modesty around our current and historic capacities.

The rest of the text goes on to detail practical ways in which one can become a better speaker and listener, but I want to venture that a good listener can have a fruitful conversation with a poor speaker, but not the other way around.

A good listener helps the speaker clarify/process their thoughts, to “move from a confused, agitated state of mind to one that was more focused and (hopefully) more serene”. They make verbal nods to signal attention, know when to interrupt, and don’t moralize upon hearing vulnerable thoughts and feelings.

I’m not a professional by any means, but I’ve learned about and practiced active listening through counseling classes in undergrad as well as volunteering at a crisis call line. Women are also socialized to be proficient listeners at a young age; we grow up being confidantes to our best friends, mothers, Hinge dates, and in my case, my 5th grade teacher asking, “Do you know what a pink slip is? After this year, two out of the three first-year teachers are going to get laid off, and I’m really scared.”

Core memory. I did not know what a pink slip was at the time, and she ended up being the one teacher to survive. I babysat one of her current students recently. Miss P is still teaching at my old elementary school and remembers me for drawing her pictures all the time.

Anyways, remember when this Tiktok about over-active listeners was making its rounds? I couldn’t stop looping it when it first dropped because it felt like experiencing first hand what it’s like to have a conversation with me. Morbid. This video about conserving your energy in conversations found its way to my feed recently and it’s been living in my head rent free. Yes I am always tired after long convos and stretches of socializing yes the way I bob my head and punctuate your every sentence with “omg right.” has been memeified but I would still like to stay honest about how much I want to hear your thoughts and stories and imagine exactly how you felt in a certain scenario.

misc A nice pizza-and-paint night with friends from our February book club. I got to play with gouache for the first time. Someone brought a homemade coconut-raspberry pie, and I picked up a pint of matcha ice cream from Kansha Creamery, the greatest ice cream shop of all time and Torrance’s pride and joy

With less than three months left until I move to London, I feel myself tempted to pull away from these friends I’ve sort-of known for the past year. I crave platonic intimacy so much and yet the process of acquiring it seems like such an insurmountable task for someone like me, with my limited social energy and inability to reply to texts for weeks on end. Not to mention the narrative that I bring little to a friendship and therefore I am not even worth anyone’s time that I interact with from time to time.

In moments of lucidness I am able to fully understand that these things are not true. I have lovely and wonderful friends who find me lovely and wonderful as well. Building good, solid relationships takes time and mutual intentionality. Those things are hard to come by when you are in your 20s in Los Angeles, so I shouldn’t take it as a personal failure that I have not found my doing-life-together friends here yet. In the place of my forever friends down here, I’ve built a relationship with Andy that I treasure deeply, and I’ve worked hard to prune the path towards my future in postgrad studies. I’ve done well to maintain my long distance friendships and lay promising foundations for new ones, and yet!

cue Saorise-Ronan-as-Jo-in-Little Women (2019) choking out those heavy and shameful words—and yet I’m so lonely!

Gosh, we’re all so lonely!

misc 2 I hadn’t originally planned on unpacking all of that, because my miscellaneous thing consumed was supposed to be Season One of The American BBQ Showdown on Netflix. I’ve never watched GBBO but completely understand the appeal now. I don’t even like barbeque that much, but the contestants were all so silly and likable.

I was also very impressed by Andy’s knowledge of grilling meats, ex-Waco boy that he is. They would show a macro shot of the meat, and Andy would go, “probably didn’t take it far enough” and then the judge would take a bite and say, “you didn’t take it far enough.” Okay meathead slay

Lastly!!! The hosts’ commitment to screaming “show me the meats” at the end of every challenge was incredibly inspiring. I would also like to commit to a life of being loud and enthusiastic about everything I do, even if it makes people cringe.

Ingredient of the Week: Peach 🍑

🥄 Sofie

One thing about me is that food waste is my pet peeve.

Maybe it stems from kindergarten when I read this Japanese children’s book about an anti-waste grandma that licks grains of rice off of a child’s face, or from my time working at Trader Joe’s, where trashcans were piled high with nearly perfect foods to be thrown in the dumpster. Whatever it is, food waste really grinds my gears.

Also, according to the USDA, 31% of food in American grocery stores is thrown away. I think about this a lot.

I went to the Davis night market and rescued some OVERRIPE, BRUISED, and maybe-even-almost-moldy-if-you-look-close-enough peaches + nectarines. I often try to pick the overripe bananas and peaches when distributed at the pantry, because I know, no one will take them home. Perfect for Banana bread, perfect for pie — this is how I reason. For those of you that don’t know, Davis night market recovers food from local food businesses that would otherwise go to waste and redistributes it to the community for free, every Monday to Friday from 9-11pm at the park.

Anyways, I made a stone fruit, lime, and cinnamon jam!

🍚 Hayoung

(Remember that I am traveling, and that for the foreseeable future, I shall be simply posting food that contain the ingredient of the week)

This week, I had this peach drink. For my Western friends, this peach flavor is quite hard to find in the US because the flavor is—to my knowledge—an Asian invention. And it blows my mind that this flavor hasn’t taken off as a food trend AKA commodified by corporations. Like someone give me reasons why this hasn’t happened yet. I’d like to know.

🥢 Youree

Here’s a playlist titled peach that I’ve enjoyed for the last few years. It’s not mine, but there are a bunch of other playlists titled by other colors, as well.

thanks for reading 🫂

When we hit 100 followers on IG, we’re going to do something crazy. You know how some people are a jajangmyung person and others a jjampong? We want to see—once and for all—why this is the case using a variety of tools like SCIENCE and a Google form that’s sure to go viral. So follow us on Instagram!

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Today, I’d like to share more about how the actual event went down.

The Baker’s Box took place on a Saturday afternoon.

It was a classic November day in Michigan which means that the weather is taunting you at every hour: Will it rain? Snow? Sleet? Get pretend mad and then passive aggressively do nothing?

No one ever knows. You just have to prepare for everything everywhere all at once.

This is already TMI, but I wanted to show up to the event either wearing the plainest outfit possible (Jeans + Walmart Mono-color t-shirt) to identify with the people, or a really quirky fit that would let people know that it’s okay to be out there and just be yourself.

As you can see…

I chose the latter, suitin’ up in my favorite pair of thrifted overalls, a Forever 21 sunflower t-shirt, a bandana, and light green shoes. This fit wasn’t nearly warm enough, but whatever. For the children. Aesthetic over utility.

Jasmyn (one of the OurHouse staff) and I showed up an hour early to Growing Hope’s multi-purpose fellowship hall, to whom we are grateful for allowing us to use their space. The vibes were immaculate, especially because they had those cute lights you see at mainstream wanna-be hipster restaurants 💀.

I noticed that Jasmyn was carrying a box of coloring books and a stack of manga. Jasmyn told me that during these monthly life skill events, OurHouse youth needed a Goldilocks environment to stay focused the entire time. If the task is too difficult, they get frustrated and walk away. If it’s too easy, then it’s boring and not stimulating enough. It needs to be just right. The coloring books and manga were there as a secondary activity that would prevent any major disruptions to the main event.

She patted my back, smiled, and told me not to take it personally if everyone decided to peace-out during the event.

I wasn’t particularly worried because I view these events as a dynamic process, not as a static failure/success binary.

It’s something I learned from Nadezdha Savova-Grigorova, who licensed me in bread art therapy in the middle of Bulgaria (Sorry, this story is for another day).

During our training, she taught me that people are always watching, growing, and becoming, even if it looks like they aren’t paying attention.

It’s like the different parts and stages of a plant. A seed needs water and patience. A flower needs gentle hands and admiration. Their fundamental essence as a plant is the same, but their needs, timing, and capacities are drastically different. We call this difference good.

There’s also a kind of freedom in admitting that both the seed and flower are always in the process of having become and becoming. The goal isn’t to forcibly change anyone but to create the space for becoming to happen.1 In the same way, I have the freedom to meet people where they are, knowing with full confidence that they will listen at the capacity they have at the moment.2

One by one, people started to trickle in, filling out their name-tag and awkwardly making small talk with those around them. Before starting the event, I made sure to valuably use this time by doing what I do best: Eavesdrop.

There was a really wide range of people at the event. Most of the adult mentors understood the assignment. They knew that this event was a time to have fun, reflect on their lives through food, and enjoy some fellowship with each other. I was encouraged because they genuinely sounded like they were looking forward to it.

On the other hand, the youth, particularly the boys, seemed to have showed up because they had nothing better to do, or strong-armed strongly encouraged by a staff to attend. I overheard a couple of the older boys call the event too “girly” for them.

Fortunately, I specialize in working with MFM! (Men with fragile masculinities)

Once we had gathered around the table, I began the event by reading from the introduction of our reflection journal3 :

In the Midwest, fall is an important season to honor and participate in the harvest of food, friendships, and family.

When we share our harvest with one another, we are not only consuming material goods to sustain our physical bodies, but also our whole selves.

With every bite, we are nurtured with an abundance of stories and dreams. This is why we believe that eating harvests is a profound act of being human.

As you work through this booklet, our hope is that you come away feeling a little bit more rested, contemplative, and loved.

The room went silent, in a reverent but light-hearted manner, similar to the silence that takes place in the early stages of a hike together with friends.4 I love that words possess the incalculable power to steady and open hearts.

It was game time, baby.

Program

The event was broken down into four parts:

• Cupcake

• Cookies

• Cake

• Cheesecake bites

For each part, I acted as the facilitator and had participants spend some time reflecting on the baked good we were about to decorate through various questions, coloring activities, and prompts. After a time of sharing, one of my three esteemed baker friends taught us how to decorate the baked good.5

The following sections are a few (hopefully brief) reflections from each activity with the exception of cheesecake bites, which ended up becoming just a free-for-all as we ran out of time!

Cupcakes (Rachel Martindale)

The aim of the first activity was to use food as empowerment. By decorating cupcakes based on color therapy, I hoped that people would be able to name what they want, creatively express it into physical form, and eventually digest it within them.

I asked people to spend five minutes to color, reflect, and write in their journal, with special attention given to the color red (passion), orange (warmth), and yellow (hope).

What I learned from facilitating this activity is that vulnerability is a space-maker too.

Food certainly aids in this process as well:

“Cooking is like love. It should be entered into with abandon or not at all.”

-Harriet Van Horne

I also learned that the hardest part about vulnerability is beginning it.

When I asked if anyone wanted to share, it was my mentee who shot his hand up and shared about his dream to be financially secure, to live independently, and one day, to support his own family. It was his vulnerability that created space for everyone afterwards to share honestly too.

I also loved that the boys who initially found this activity as “too girly” ended up being the ones who obsessed over the best way to make flower cupcake decorations. You already know I was hyping them up by calling them *insert their first name* Ramsey HAHA.

Cookies (Hira Mohsin)

The second activity focused on using food to understand differences as a source of strength, not conflict.

Food literally knows this better than anyone. It’s the acidic zing in a lime that elevates the street taco. Or consider the humble almond that’s added to a salad for texture. Differences = Flavor Town.

From this activity, I really appreciated (and found it hilarious) how confessional the responses were from folks.

I asked people to just let it all out. Who is the chocolate to your vanilla, and why?

A few of the people’s answers:

• The sibling who is a clean freak.

• The friend who can’t seem to keep a secret.

• The parental guardian that hates everything I do for some reason.

At first, it really felt like we were a support group, brazenly confiding in one another about the “differences” of those around us, which ended up becoming a euphemism to describe the people we found really annoying.

But at some point, I asked people to view the differences as complements. One by one, as we re-imagined the narrative, I got the sense that people were relieved to wave the white flag and admit that they do indeed love those who are different from them.

I think despite our best attempts to thoroughly hate some people, we realize (hopefully sooner than later) how exhausting it can be. We want to be free from the prisons we create ourselves.

Thankfully, liberation is easier when we do it together.

Cake (Camrey)

Through cake, I wanted people to realize and remember that community is not a side-quest but essential to human flourishing. As May Sarton writes, the people we love are built into us.

One way this accidentally worked itself out was that there wasn’t enough frosting for everyone. (I find it hilariously poetic when accidents feel destined. Take that, free will! or destiny? I’m confused.)

In the moment, I was scrambling, but a few weeks after the event, I remembered that a scarcity of resources is actually a built-in feature of bread art therapy. These moments are an invitation to share rather than hoard.

Sharing is uncomfortable but a better vision of reality. It forces us to come face-to-face to engage, dialogue, and compromise with the other. In this case, people had to wait their turn and be mindful in their decorations. Those who didn’t have enough of one color had to use more of another.

Sharing puts us up against limitations, and whether we like it or not, it’s the boundaries that form us to be innovative and constantly rethink our decisions on what we want, how we want, when we want.

I found this moment to be eye-opening when I realized that to not sharing is actually an illusion. There’s no such thing as an unlimited resource. When we don’t share with the immediate people around us, it means we are possibly depriving people of resources who are far from us or those who will come after us. The question is not if we share but how.

Final Thoughts

We ended the event by putting all the decorated baked goods into cute boxes: one for our friend and one for us. Everyone was such a cutie pie.

On the drive home, I spent most of the time reflecting on the most memorable moment for me.

It was one of the OurHouse youth responding to the last cake question:

Question: “The base layer (of a cake) keeps everything together. What keeps you grounded?”

Response: “My mentor is my base layer. When my friends and family put me down, don’t believe me, and continue to discourage me, it is my mentor that keeps me grounded. She believes me. Encourages me. Keeps me going. She has grounded me in a way that no one else has.”

In many ways, it is exactly these type of moments we want to cultivate at a Table Fables moment—to use food as a means to give us the language to articulate what we know to be so true in our hearts (and stomachs).6

Thanks for reading, and please let me know if you want to do an event like this! We would be ecstatic to see people replicate this with their own lil’ spin.

-Hayoung

a retrospective state of affairs from the table fables team

🥄 Sofie: As we near the end of the school year, facing graduation in less than 20 days, my days have never been more aggressively oversaturated with social activities. Am I…a party animal?? It’s a side of college I thought I’d never experience out of disinterest(?) or maybe it’s just that my desire to do pottery wins over almost anything, but it’s been good to enjoy the presence of friends and even make new ones along the way in the past weekend. Currently sad that it’s all ending and we’re all moving away, but so it goes.

🍚 Hayoung: I have now been in Korea for a little under a week. It has been nothing but pure joy to smooch my relatives, travel 2+ hours to spend time with my long-distance gal, and eat food 24/7. Currently I am on the west coast with my mom, brother, and grandma for a lil’ 3 day trip. We are chillin in a Hanok as we speak.

🥢 Youree: Andy and I are finishing up preparations for our dinner on Wednesday, which also happens to coincide with another big deadline for a freelance project. I find myself wondering if I actually even like design, because Reader, it is a painful process every mouse click and pixel push of the way, rife with self doubt and frustration… then I’ll actually finish something and think, huh, I really like this and making it was fun! And I’m going to say it now before I enter that deluded state once again—it is 99% strugs and 1% fun. But I’m still going to keep doing it. Am I in a toxic relationship with Illustrator??

Currently Consuming

what we ate, what we we read, and one miscellaneous thing that fed our souls this week.

🥄 Sofie

Eating: My friend Cassidy and I organized a craft center cheese night on Thursday, and it might one of the most fun things I’ve ever done. It was a cheese-bread-wine + powerpoint night where almost 30 people crammed into a 1 room studio apartment for the most wholesome night of food sharing. All of the cheeses and miscellaneous foods were served on cutting boards and ceramic dishes made by the guests and hosts themselves — just 1 thing I love about eating with craft center friends. Also, Luis brought a telescope for us to look at the moon!

What I made (like a maniac until 4am the day-of):

• Russian honey cake (on my top 5 cakes list)

• Cinnamon infused sweet potato swirl brownies (favorite brownie recipe)

• Banana pudding

• Rosemary focaccia (baked at the venue because nothing beats fresh bread out of the oven)

Other foods like vegetables and crackers were mostly foraged from the school pantry and student farm!

Reading: Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and Person by M.C Richards.

“The experience of centering is one I particularly sought, because I thought of myself as dispersed — Interested in too many things. I envied people who were single minded, who had one powerful talent, who knew when they got up in the morning what it was they had to do. Where as I, wherever I turned, felt the enchantment. To the window, for the sweetness of air , to the door, for the passing figures, to the teapot, the typewriter, the knitting needles, the pets, the pottery, the newspaper, the telephone — wherever I looked, I could’ve lived”.

Misc: I lost myself in the ceramics on Tuesday, wheel-throwing bowls, plates, pie dishes, and more bowls until I could no longer responsibly keep on throwing. Tuesday mornings are my protected ceramics time, but I threw from 10:30-4:30 without a break this week. I might be compensating for having to leave the studio in a few weeks… but I really want to improve as much as humanly possible before graduating.

🍚 Hayoung

Eating: I’ve actually gained a few pounds since coming to Korea, and I’m not sure how to stop it from continuing to happen. It’s hard to choose a single food, but if I had to , I’m going with this mak guksu (막국수)!!!! Wonju (my mom’s hometown) is famous for this noodle! It’s similar to naengmyun but the noodles have more buckwheat.

Reading: I’ve been reading a collection of Li-Young Lee’s poems. My favorite so far is “I Ask My Mother to Sing”. It’s been particularly moving as I’ve had the opportunity to watch my own mother and grandmother reunite and spend time together. 😭

Misc: I recently started re-watching BEEF and writing down all the moments food is used either as physical food, symbol, or dialogue. Watch out for a solo post on this in a few weeks!

🥢 Youree

eating Cambodian Rice Noodle Soup from Phnom Penh Noodle Shack in Long Beach, CA. It’s a family owned restaurant that’s been around for decades. I’m dying to go back and try the dry noodles and congee. We visited around 2PM on a Sunday afternoon and waited around 30 minutes to get seated—drive by and drop a friend off to put down their name while you struggle to park in the area for max time efficiency.

reading Where No One Suffers Hungry by my friend Havannah. I finally got a copy of her second zine at the 10th Annual LA Zine Fest this weekend, and it was well worth the wait; this essay made me weep. She writes about “care [as] the antidote to violence,” both in exercising grace in personal relationships, and embodying resilience in the difficult work of fighting for abolition.

A bowl of long-simmered broth, painstakingly prepared for a sick parent who has hurt you deeply. Losing your voice at the State Capitol, demanding justice for refugees and immigrants being taken from their families and forced into cages.

And in that, seeing glimpses of the world that is possible—one where no one suffers hungry.

misc “Can someone confirm that this is what being Asian American in your 20s looks like”: Confirmed.

Ingredient of the Week: 🥚 Egg.

🥄 Sofie: I made rose water ice cream for a last minute dinner party hosted by my friend Maya, who is moving to Alaska tomorrow. Theme of the night: clean out the fridge.

I managed to make everything this week with ingredients I already had in my kitchen, except for the butter in the pie’s crumble topping, which was kindly donated by craft center friend Ethan. If not to share butter, what are friends for?

🍚 Hayoung: What’s Eggnormativity got to do with Home?

I didn’t make anything this week involving an egg. At some point, my guess is that this will become a space to explore ingredients without necessarily creating anything. To be fair, I am on the move in a country where I speak at the 1st-grade level (if that) with a kitchen that is well-guarded by the matriarchy known as my mother, grandma, and aunt.

In lieu of my inability to cook anything, I thought I’d reflect on a specific type of Korean roasted egg, which is often found in and associated with saunas.

The best part about being in Korea is not necessarily the taste of the food. DON’T GET ME WRONG, THE KOREAN FOOD here is tons better at a much cheaper price compared to the States. But more than taste and price, the best part of being in Korea is that it’s the default.

Again. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy making and explaining Korean food to my friends who might be trying it for the first time. I enjoy going to the Korean markets in Michigan and talking to the store owners in Konglish about their decision framework on what to buy domestic, import, and make. I like being Korean-American (because, I guess, it’s all I could know).

But when something isn’t the default, when something is the “other”, the amount of effort and intention to center it is sheer hustle. That particular brand of soy sauce? Yeah, I’m checking all five Asian marts. The rice paper that’s only in Kroger when I don’t need it? That’s 20 minutes wasted. Even the Korean roasted egg. I know that I’m not going to find it in a grocery store, so I’m going to take time to read on it and make it at home.

Even if it is easy to make, and even if I’m learning—on my own—new ways to remember my cultural heritage and sharpen my culinary skills, I get tired.

I am tired because it’s hard to feel like I belong in a space where although I might be the most culturally comfortable, I’m leaving the store empty-handed and hungry.

That’s why, when my brother was literally dancing at the sight of a roasted egg at the Korean convenience store, I hit the nae-nae with him too. Gate-keep or discourse all you want about what it means to be truly Korean or American or anything, but it feels good to be home.

🥢 Youree

Natto & nagaimo bibimbap. I like slimy things, and I hate handling raw meat, so eggs and natto are both in my regular rotation of easy proteins. This took all of 3 minutes to make, which shouldn’t even matter because according to East Asian superfood lore, the ingredients in this meal make it so that I’m going to live forever. Quite possibly my greatest nightmare, so I will compensate by drinking more black coffee first thing in the morning and lying down immediately after I eat.

thanks for reading 🫂

This week you can look forward to Part 2 of the Baker’s Box saga, eat some eggs, listen to Korean American icon Jay Park’s NPR Tiny Desk (tiny 책상 takes me out), and follow us on Instagram.

And send this to your hungriest friend. Sharing is caring.

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