Soul Food Review

Soul Food

Authors

Seong Seok-je, Baek Young-ok, Kim Chang-wan, Lee Chung-girl, Kim Eo-jun (written by)

Publisher

Cheoneoram Media | Published 2011-10-12

Category

Poetry/Essay

Book intro

A food prescription that fills the hunger deep in the soul! Popular domestic writers ...

Reviewer rating

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Soul food... I wondered what kind of book it was, and the content is an essay collection. It's listed as having 5 authors, but it seemed like about 15, and each author unfolded their own soul food one by one. There was a story about the rice balls eaten while studying in Noryangjin, and a story about some snack shop. There was also a story where someone, thinking about their mother's 'coffee,' wrote down what meaning the coffee that came to them held. Reading straight through... um, it wasn't all that interesting. There wasn't much to really think about, but it was nice in the sense that I just read through it comfortably. It's not that I felt this content was tremendously valuable, though; I concluded that maybe the nice part is being able to tell the stories of memorable foods I ate in the past.

1. Rice Balls

I have a rice-ball story too. Before becoming a college student I had no occasion to eat rice balls, but near the university I attended there was a restaurant called 'Meeting Plaza.' It wasn't a specialty restaurant, but more like a snack shop cum convenience store. It was a strange place that also sold alcohol and tofu-kimchi, and it tended to both close early and open early. The rice balls I ate especially at that place were full of sesame oil, salt, seasoning, and seaweed flakes, and they weren't enormously delicious, but I remember it being quite satisfying to buy some and eat when I was hungry at night, really hungry. To eat 'a late-night snack' it was usually 5,000 or 6,000 won per person, but since those rice balls solved it, I think of that food—only a thousand won, decent in portion, and good in taste.

I'm in the army now, and here I've made and eaten rice balls exactly twice; on June 25 (Korean War memorial day) we made rice balls because there was an event to eat rice balls. To feed the unit's personnel we made about 4,000 of them.....ugh.... rice balls have become a food of love and hate. What I ate here had more ingredients go in and more care put in, so it tasted better too, but it was just as exhausting all the same.

2. White Bread!!

Ever since I was very young, I liked white bread. From the corn bread that replaced meals when I was very little, to high school, when I ate this bread as a way to chase off sleep in the morning. I never imagined chasing away drowsiness with something to eat, but there was no method like it. The memory of tearing off pieces of bread one by one while listening to online lectures from 6:30 to 8:00 is something that couldn't help but stay with me. Inside a plastic bag, not bothering with jam, just plain 'bread' alone. Holding out like that for about 10 months, before I knew it the day of the exam had arrived....

After coming to the unit, this thing called white bread became the kind of bread that soothes my hunger a bit as a late-night snack. While eating it simply, watching TV together, talking about documentaries, and discussing programs like 'Forgiveness' or 'You've Changed'—white bread, the kind of food that relieves boredom. Thanks to this cheap, tasty, and plain white bread, I think I became a 'bread fiend.'

I'd like to say soul food is, in the end, food that has settled in a corner of my memory.