cultures coming together

During my first year of college as a Boston University student, I was introduced to many different dishes and amongst the many, one of my favorite places to go to is Futago. This place, called Futago Udon, is a popular udon restaurant amongst the students in Boston University. Since it is located in South Campus, this place is very convenient for students to go to. One of my favorite dishes from this place is this dish in the picture above, called the Pork Kimchi Udon. This dish contains udon noodles, kimchi, slices of pork belly, spicy pickled cabbage, enoki mushrooms, scallions, and a poached egg. When I first got this dish, the smell of the dish reminded me of my own cultural cuisine. Trying the noodles and the soup of the dish made a clearer image in my head of what cultural cuisine this dish reminded me of. Although it may not be the exact same taste, it tastes very similar to a Korean dish called kimchi jjigae, which is like a kimchi stew with other ingredients like pork or seafood, scallions, onions, and diced tofu. As you can see in the picture, the broth is like an orangey-red color, which the eater can infer that the broth was mixed with a lot of the kimchi’s sauce and possibly why it tastes so much like kimchi jjigae. Overall, the udon itself with the poached egg was a little greasy and therefore it felt a little heavy at times, but the right amount of spice from the kimchi and a hint of scallion helped take the greasiness away.

Like this dish, modern day food has developed and incorporates many ingredients and techniques from different kinds of culture and places. This specific dish also has two explicitly different cultures incorporated. In this dish, there is a combination of Korean culture and Japanese culture in this dish. Udon noodles typically form a Japanese diet and culture and although I personally do not know what authentic udon tastes like, this dish allows me to get a sense of what udon tastes like. On top of the udon noodles, pork belly is also one of the widely used ingredients used in Japanese noodles. The combination of the udon noodles and pork belly together in one dish adds onto the tastes of Japanese culture. The other ingredient, kimchi, originated from Korea and it is a well-known side dish amongst Korean people. As a Korean, it is so interesting to see how my cultural food is intertwined with many different cultural foods, resulting in allowing many people to get a little bit of my cultural taste. I also found it interesting how this bowl was black because it reminded me of the traditional Japanese bowls and traditional Korean stone pots that are also black. It was interesting to see and think about not only the taste of the food itself, but also how the plating can allow the eater to experience the different cultures incorporated in the dish. Going back to the food itself, this fusion of Korean food and Japanese food not only allowed me to experience my own cultural taste, but also allowed me to taste a little bit of Japanese culture.

Even before writing about this observation and description, I wanted my research to be focused on fusion food. I really like the idea of how different cultural cuisines spread throughout the world and how people fuse their own culture into it in order to incorporate their culture into another, which engages many people to learn about the two different cultural cuisines and how they can get along together. Through this exhibit assignment, I decided that I wanted to focus more specifically on how my cultural food, kimchi, fuses with other cultural foods and how that helps the Korean culture spread throughout the world. This assignment also aroused a new potential research question in how the plating of the food affects the experience of the dish. With this research I think I can expand my knowledge in my culture while also exploring and learning about other cultures that are tied into cuisines. I think this research would be interesting not only for me, but for others because this research can essentially show why people purposefully fuse two different cuisines together.