K-BAP, the Second.

           If you have read the first K-BAP story, you already have learned 15 percent of Korean food. Congratulation!! If you haven’t read the first story, this story can be difficult to understand. I strongly recommend you to read the first story. You can easily find it in the K-BAP Stories page. For this time, I am going to talk about the regional difference of Korean Food.

You all would agree that the foods of Southern U.S are different from Northern U.S. Even, the recipes of same dish are different from each other. Because United States is very large country, there is no wonder for regional difference. Compared to United States, Korea has a lot less wide territory. Thus, most of you might think there would not be regional difference of dishes in Korea. However, the taste, recipes, and even appearance of foods are different among the Korean regions. There are some expectable grounds for the difference, but two features of Korea are most important.

The first cause is the geographical features of Korea. There is a long mountain range called as the spine of Korea. The real name of this mountain range is Baekdu-daegan. (If you click on Baekdu-daegan, you can see the map of it.)  Baekdu-daegan ranges from Mt. Baekdu in the North Korea to Mt. Jiri in the very south of the South Korean peninsula. Because of this spine and its connected small mountains, Korean people could not avoid building different food cultures by regional groups.

The second cause for the difference of dishes is the meteorological characteristics. From so many centuries ago, Korea has been well-known as having distinct four seasons. Koreans have been set their whole life to weather of different seasons. The food culture was, also, no exception. However, the food culture affected by weather has been differently applied by the degrees of latitude. Southern Korean people added much more salty ingredients compared to Northern people added less salt to their foods.

According to overall characteristics include weather and geography that affected Korean food culture, South Korea can be divided into four regional groups. Capital area, Gangwon-province, Jeonla-province, and Gyeongsang-province are those four groups. In the next post, specific explanation and examples of these regional groups would be treated. Thank you!

- S. Choi -