Ecofeminism and the future of jib-bap
By Kim-Shin
Hyo-jeong
Published:
October 13, 2015
Translated
by Jieun Lee
Editor’s
note: the author of this article, Kim-Shin Hyo-jeong, is a feminist researcher
and activist.
There is No Future for Korean Jip-Bap
It is sad
to say that there is no future in Korean jip-bap
[homemade
food],
as having your own house and
the time for dinner is an unapproachable mirage for young adults. The
younger generation in South Korea receives minimum wage and
lives in rooms
rented by the month, surviving on processed food made of imported ingredients
full of MSG. How long can this kind of life be sustained? Firstly, we need to
accept that we do not have a
future. Accepting that there is no future is the first step towards the
possibility of talking about new options.
But do
not hold onto
any hope. It is a lie that in the situation we are now in, we can talk about
hope. I also used to talk about hope and tried to deny reality, but I eventually needed to
accept that there was no future—especially for the Korean dining
table. Yet, we must eat in order to live (and please set aside the
attitude that we can live off of bread if there is no rice).
You
probably have seen at least once the slogan “You Are What You Eat” in numerous
books about food. If what I eat becomes my flesh and blood, then our bodies, eating Korean food, are colonies occupied by the colonizers that are
transnational agricultural enterprises, imported farm products, and GMOs (Genetically Modified
Organism). Please face up to this: your body is just a colony without sovereignty.
 |
| Red beans indigenous to Korea. Our dining table is occupied by imported farm products and GM foods instead of agricultural products native to Korea. © Kim-Shin Hyo-jeong |
Jip-Bap’s Revolution? What About the
Ingredients?
Nowadays,
there is a jip-bap trend. Baek Jong-won’s
self-proclaimed mission to show an easy and simple way of cooking jip-bap
“post-Mom style,” seems to state that the society in which anybody can cook for
themselves has already come into being. However, Hwang Kyo-ik has criticized the
lack of homemade feeling
in Baek Jong-won’s food,
and declares that the only true jip-bap
is that made by mothers.
In the middle of this
debate on jip-bap, Kim Won-jeong and other
feminists argue that regardless of gender, age, or whether single or part of a
family of four, everybody should not only take care of themselves and others,
but also create a way to sustain this labor of cooking jip-bap.
That is, the dining table needs a “sociology of caring,” going beyond the gender binary
and the
market economy.
However,
when
discussing jip-bap, what must be pointed out is
how the ingredients for jip-bap are produced. South Korea not
only ranks number one for importing edible GMOs, but is also the
biggest importer of GM superfoods, so that cooking oil, fermented soy products,
tofu, starch syrup, and many other products sold in South Korea are almost all made
from GM soy or corn.
Most people
eat triangular-shaped
gim-bap made of imported
rice filled with artificial additives and beef—the cattle not only having been
confined in a factory-like livestock industrial environment but also having been
fed with GM corn feed. With this, they also have an egg—full of antibiotics and
growth accelerators—and cook and eat soybean paste soup which tastes like processed soy
bean paste made from GM soy beans. The safety of GM foods has continuously been
a source of controversy because
of their possibility for causing all sorts of cancers,
sterility, atopic dermatitis, etc.
Even
though our dining table is
in danger, can there be an alternative? Couldn’t we fill the
table with organic food products bought
from a co-op market?
However, a kinfolk-style ecofriendly meal with vegetables just harvested from the backyard
garden and organic sauces
is possible only for a few
people and those in the privileged class. Most people need to
prepare dinner for family members and themselves after coming
home from an all-day-long job. Cooking is not only a continuation of labor, but
also, sometimes, feels like a
waste of time. And women are still in charge of doing housework like cooking.
Easily
heated instant food, whether genetically
modified or processed, gives people more time to rest their weary bodies
before having to go to work the next morning. Moreover, in order to make jip-bap
nutritional or to find healthy
meals in the city, one needs to spend money that is
sometimes more than their
hourly wage. For some, cooking is a leisurely habit, but for most workers, preparing meals every day is tiring labor.
Is There an Alternative to the Dangerous Dining Table,?
 |
| Tiger-patterned soy beans (above) and cowpeas native to Korea (below) © Kim-Shin Hyo-jeong |
The
reason why people cannot help having imported agricultural products and GM foods is that South
Korea’s degree of food self-sufficiency
is low. It
is around twenty-three percent,
and even this percentage is taken up mostly by the amount of
rice production, which is the staple food of Koreans. Yet, a still more
miserable future is expected. Having completely opened the doors of the rice market [to international competition],
the Park Geun-hye administration
is now attempting to promote
agricultural products such as GM rice and pepper.
Because
imported agricultural products—priced
low due to government subsidies—occupy Korean dining
tables, South Korean farmers cannot afford the cost of production and have been
giving up farming as they fall into debt. The Korean dining table has already been
overtaken by GM processed foods and imported agricultural products, so that preparing a safe meal which
does not threaten one’s health has now become exhausting and unaffordable. And
even though the poor should have healthy food, the contemporary reality is that
they have the worst food
and are also paying more for their medical bills.
When
did producing unconditionally large
amounts of agricultural products with identical flavors become
the goal of our farming? Our dining table is colonized by beans, corn, and wheat that all have the same size, the same
mass, the same taste, the same genes.
However,
there are still hundreds of
kinds of soy beans native to Korea. One
kind is higher in carbohydrates than other types, so that when it is eaten with rice, it
makes the
taste of the rice
sweet. A variety of
such beans for rice-cooking exist, depending on the season
and region. Nevertheless, we consume only identical GMO soy beans on a worldwide
basis. Beans developed by Monsanto, a transnational agricultural company, are
used for making cooking oil, tofu, corn-forage, etc., and are identical in every way, from taste
and to genetic traits.
What we desperately need is not the production
of more identical agricultural products, but increasing the variety of nutrients and tastes
and the production
of different organisms so that we can prepare a safe and healthy meal. This dining table paradigm
shift is necessary to escape from the value of pursuing more in terms of amount,
and going toward a diversity of organisms while considering
both the taste and nutrition of food.
What Ecofeminism Tells You
Feminism
has been speaking for minorities like women, people of color, disabled people,
and LGBTQI
people, who have all been
considered Other in society. Feminism is not only a perspective, but also a
view of the world which allows one to see something that has been regarded as
natural as an unnatural thing. Feminism is not just one voice but has been
speaking for different voices depending on the time and space.
For
example, a few feminist groups argued that women should leave the house and
kitchen, criticizing labor such as housework and care-giving, which, under patriarchy, had burdened
only women.
The women who left their houses and kitchens looked forward to working just
like men and getting paid as much as men did. However, amid capitalistic expansion
and development,
people live pressed
by time due to wage labor,
regardless of gender. The goal of feminism is
not to work excessively, or
to eat GMOs
and fast food.
 |
| Meal made up of foods native to Sangju, North Gyeongsan Province, in the summer © Mun Jun-hui |
Ecofeminism
has been talking about a different way of development. It suggests reconsidering
the existing development paradigm which is at odds with
humanistic thought and only calculates value in money. There is no longer
a ladder of growth that we must climb up. GDP (Gross Domestic Product), which depends only on economic value
measurements, cannot explain our lives because it does not reflect the culture
of our lives and the value of diversity.
For
example, GDP does not include the fact that people share and eat the highly
nourishing foods farmed from native seeds on their own land, because this self-sufficiency
and sharing of meals do not require people to exchange money. However, GDP does
go up when trees in an
over five-hundred year-old forest are cut down for a one-time ski competition, due
to the fact that there will be expenses incurred in the destruction of the
forest and expenses incurred in the construction of the ski resort.
Now, we
need to start
a new discussion about jip-bap beyond the gender binary question of whether
it is men’s or women’s labor. In the current South Korean situation in which
single-person households account
for over twenty-five percent of all
households
and the whole of society is overworked, jip-bap
is no longer merely about familial dining table issues and should not be talked
about only
in the discourses of cooking as an individual’s hobby or leisure. Jip-bap is a matter of survival. We
should retrieve our sovereignty over our food, which was
deprived by enterprise and the
market. We should kick out the GMO dining table and set a
dining table full of seasonality
and vitality.
Earth
is a huge network of life where all kinds of living creatures depend on each other to
live. Here and now, it is time to talk about the future of the dining table through
ecofeminism.
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