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I have family connections into South Korea and this article makes me think of the changes in the Korean diet over the past few decades. When I was first started encountering Korean food over 20 years ago (both in the states and in Korea), everything was either sourced from fresh ingredients, or preserved using some kind of traditional method like pickling, fermenting, or curing. There were very few factory processed ingredients, maybe fish cake, and some condiments. There was a notable absence of sugars and sweetness, even in desserts. I ate more fruit in the first year with my wife than I probably had in the decade prior as it was constantly served as snacks and after meals. I never found Korean portion sizes appreciably smaller than American portions, but I struggled eating through a meal until I fully adapted to mixing banchan in between bites -- which introduced me to the palette cleanser. There were some problems in the diet, mostly lots of instant coffees, tons of alcohol, questionable "medicines", and everybody smoked. But people were generally fit or thin, walked a lot, were tall (a sign of good nutrition), and lived long lives. In the years since then I was introduced to concepts like the "Bliss Point" [1] and "Taste Satiety" which explained both the taste of Doritos and the use of Kimchi to cleanse the palette so you could eat more. Over time the Korean diet has changed and I've started to recognize that the food sciences are taking over for the traditional home-made meals and the flavors in Korean food are changing dramatically -- you can feel them targeting the bliss point in flavor. In some ways its getting harder to eat out because it's not hard to cook at home, and make it taste better, and we can keep ingredients fresh. You can still find small restaurants run by old people who make things the home cooked way, but all of the larger restaurants and chains have this new kind of sweetness in the food. There's a well known TV chef [3] who even advises people on how to make their home cooking taste more like restaurants. The magic ingredient? Add sugar to basically everything. Gone is the delicate sweetness from carrots or pears, now even beef dishes blast you in the face like a candy bar. It used to be unusual to see an obese person at all in Korea (I was usually the largest person anywhere, and I'm not big by American standards). But now it's not at all unusual. Korea is where the mukbang originated [4]. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_point_(food) 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory-specific_satiety 3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paik_Jong-won 4 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukbang |