
Inquirer: US government includes kimchi to America’s list of gut health-friendly foods
Seeing as how I’m the only person in my household that actually likes and eats kimchi, sometimes it’s a struggle to eat all the kimchi in the amounts that they’re sold in. For most of my life, kimchi was a dish served solely with Korean foods, rices, stews, bbq or anything that would constitute as a ‘Korean meal.’
But one day, I had this idea of just adding some of this aging kimchi to a sandwich. I didn’t have any mustard, I was out of pepperjack cheese, and my house is generally pretty sparse when it comes to condiments, and turkey, I saw this great meme about how it’s the meat that is the equivalent of a human being who doesn’t drink enough water even though they know they should, and I had this idea of adding kimchi to my sandwich to help elevate a mundane turkey sandwich.
I felt like I had just invented fire, based on the sheer life that it had injected into my entrée. And then I had one of those moments where I had to stop what I was doing and process the door I had just unlocked and opened up, realizing that I could add kimchi to a whole new world of foods out there to try and enhance them.
Kimchi in sandwiches. Kimchi in curries. Kimchi in very specific tacos. Kimchi on burgers, hot dogs. Kimchi as a side to steak or chops or fried chicken. Kimchi no longer needed to be restricted to accompanying solely Korean food, it was a revelation that I had way too late in my life.
The point is, kimchi is a wonderful food, and it’s cringeworthingly bittersweet that the United States government is recognizing it on a federal level. And it’s clear that it’s a very white people tactic of trying to push kimchi to the American people, by instead of just letting people come to their own conclusions about the food, they wrap it in a cornucopia of science in declaring it a gut health food, so that people might eat it out of health conscientious instead of branching out their tastebuds into food other than chicken tenders or bougie doughnuts.
All the scientific jargon seems legit to me, but aside from it all, kimchi is just a food that tastes great. And the thing is, like most of the Korean language, the term kimchi is so broad and subjective, and encapsulates a lot varieties other than the napa cabbage version that whitey is probably thinking is the only form of kimchi that exists.
Whatever though, as critical as I may be by the tactic, I always do like when Korean things get recognized on a more global scale. Except if through its exposure, it causes all of the greedy merchants of the world to see justification to raise their prices and make it less economical for me to get my motherland’s staple.
