The Kimchi Museum and An Older Kimchi War

Yesterday I made a visit to the Kimchi Museum in Seoul, or as it is officially known the Kimchi Field Museum (Korean site has much more content). To get there, take Line 2 of the subway to the COEX shopping center at Samsŏng station. Walk through the mall and take the escalators down a floor to the museum’s entrance.

The museum is actually quite small, but nicely done, and you can get a reasonably good feel for it through their online exhibition page. All the signs are available in both Korean and relatively decent English, and many displays have small Japanese translations as well. The history of kimchi, displays of common types of kimchi, a discussion of their ingredients, etc. are among the highlights. One long narrow passage, which we might call the “hall of propaganda” has cartoons on all of its walls extolling the endless virtues of kimchi for one’s health. We rushed perhaps a little too fast through this section but were trying to outrun an army of older Japanese tourists who were being guided through the museum behind us.

In the last room there is a kimchi tasting room (the “field work” part of the museum?) and a number of computers set up where you can view, in Korean, Japanese, or English, movies showing you how to prepare kimchi from all regions of north and south Korea.

On one wall of the computer room there were two interesting articles posted from Western newspapers. One of them was particularly interesting article by Calvin Sims from the New York Times February 5, 2000 edition. Here is the opening:

Kimchi, as the cabbage is known, has been a staple of the Korean diet for centuries, and in recent years has become an increasingly popular and lucrative export — particularly to the Japanese market. But now, the Korean kimchi industry is seething because Japanese foodmakers are increasingly marketing their own copycat kimchi (pronounced KIM-chee) — and worse, calling it kimchi.

The Koreans have even brought their complaint to international food regulators, accusing the Japanese of subverting the value of authentic kimchi. A favorable ruling for the Koreans could force Japanese makers of kimchi to call it something else.

Japan has countered that Korea has no monopoly on the term kimchi, any more than Mexico can lay claim to tacos or India to curry. But that argument does not fly with the Koreans.

“What the Japanese are selling is nothing more than cabbage sprinkled with seasonings and artificial flavorings,” said Robert Kim, assistant manager for the overseas sales team here at the Doosan Corporation, a South Korean food manufacturer that operates the world’s largest kimchi factory. “This debate is not just about protecting our market share. We are trying to preserve our national heritage.”

Apparently some 90% of kimchi exports at the time were going to Japan and a map in the museum showed clearly that the stats for Japan were huge in comparison to all other nations. Unlike the more recent Chinese kimchi scare in Korea, according to the article what was seen as especially frustrating to the Koreans was the specific ways that kimchi were made:

In a reversal of the traditional pattern in which Korean manufacturers often copied popular Japanese products at lower cost, competitors in Japan, using cheaper and less time-consuming production methods, are homing in on South Korea’s biggest kimchi export market.

Many Japanese producers skip the fermentation and add artificial sour flavoring using citric acid and gum. The Japanese sometimes use rice paste to give their kimchi a gluey consistency similar to that found naturally in the Korean version.

Critics of the Japanese kimchi say it lacks the depth of flavor and health benefits of its Korean counterpart and that Japanese cabbage contains more water and is not as crispy.

The South Korean government has petitioned the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization’s Codex Alimentarius commission to establish an international standard that would require products using the name kimchi to be fermented according to the Korean tradition.

In negotiations with representatives from South Korea and Japan, the Codex commission is drafting a kimchi standard that is scheduled to be ratified next year by the 150 member countries of the organization, which sets codes for food processing to ensure minimal health standards.

So far, neither the Japanese nor the Koreans seem satisfied with Codex’s draft standard. It defines kimchi as a “fermented” product but permits the use of citric, acetic and lactic acids, none of which are used in the traditional kimchi process.

Though I really don’t know what methods were used in its production, it is true that I have often been left unsatisfied with the cheaper supermarket kimchi I have found in Japan when I lived there. It had less of a garlic taste, felt less “meatier” and so on. However, higher quality stuff can always be found at higher prices. I have to admit that, to some extent, I’m sympathetic to the following kind of argument raised in the article by the Japan Pickle Producers Association as the article continues:

“Should the same standard be applied to curry?” said Toshio Ogawa, an adviser to the Japan Pickle Producers Association, which represents several Japanese kimchi makers. “Everyone knows that curry was invented in India, but the curry that Indians eat is quite different from the curry that Japanese eat.”

On the other hand, at least part of the problem here isn’t about Japan taking Kimchi, throwing in some natto and calling it kimchi. Instead, there is at least something to be said for the idea that a product of significantly less quality is being produced. I think it is certainly reasonable to establish, at the private level, some kind of international standard, and let products which meet that standard carry some kind of mark on them. However, just because there is a rich tradition behind kimchi, there shouldn’t be any kind of legal monopoly over the name “kimchi.” I don’t know how this developed since the article was published in 2000 but the existence of other dangerous precedents of this kind are not comforting. Don’t we have enough problems with intellectual property rights run wild?

Update: One of the other precedents for this kind of national monopolies of a kind of food I had never heard of: Feta Cheese. For more on this read an interesting post by Kerim on the subject.