The field of food studies is a rapidly growing one that has made great inroads in the past fifteen years and is now an established and important area for academic inquiry. Numerous writers have ably demonstrated that by investigating foodways, we can discover much about a given society's cultural, social, and ideological values. What becomes very evident in such studies is the inseparableness of a society and the types and ways that foods are consumed.

Studies on food are still a small and relatively underdeveloped area of Korean studies with only a few academic publications. Yet, this is an area of great potential and need, for both better understanding Korean culture and society and for teaching the intricacies of Korean history and culture. In this way, the volume under review here greatly adds to the available English-language scholarship on Korean food and also helps demonstrate the interconnectedness of history, culture, and food.

Katarzyna Cwiertka has already published on Japanese foodFootnote ¹⁰ and established herself as one of the leaders in studies of the cuisines of Northeast Asia. The present volume is a comprehensive study of twentieth-century Korean cuisine and how events such as the colonization by Japan, the Korean War, and division have played major roles in shaping the food we find today in Korea. The six chapters of the work help us understand the significance of the colonial period in both agrarian production for export and the growth of a consumer culture in early twentieth-century Korea, the industrialization of the production of foodstuffs, the impact of the wars on diet, South Korea's emergence as a global player in the export of cuisine, and the different path that North Korea has taken. In short, this is a thorough examination of the processes that have shaped the production and consumption of food in Korea over the last one hundred years.

While there is much to like in the volume, I found a few items particularly salient. First, I found the discussion of consumption in the colonial period to be fascinating. Cwiertka shows how the department store—still quite an experience in twenty-first-century Seoul—acted as the vanguard of bringing ideas of consumerism to Korea. The same aspects that made department stores popular first in Europe, then the United States and Japan, were brought to the colony and proved to be widely popular among the urban elites. In particular, the author argues that women were attracted to the stores because they gave them an acceptable way “to actively participate in modern urban life” (p. 52). And a major part of this attraction was the variety of food that could be enjoyed on the premises. While this was a pleasure reserved for the economically privileged, we can certainly see the roots of the modern mega-department stores that are found in the major urban centers of South Korea today.

I also found interesting the argument that foods such as kimch'i and makkŏlli can trace their present-day international visibility as the result of being popular exports to Japan. We are told that it was the booming exports of Korean kimch'i to Japan that led Japan to attempt to internationally market a Japanese version, kimuchi, around the time of the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. This in turn led to the efforts by the Korean government to have international standards for what constitutes kimch'i established by the United Nations. The popularity of makkŏlli followed a similar path of being highly popular in Japan as an export (some 92 percent of all exported makkŏlli in 2011 was sent to Japan) before enjoying a rebirth in Korea as a popular drink. Certainly both of these foods can be found in many corners of the globe and are two of Korea's most successful foods abroad.

The chapter on North Korea and its cuisine was also compelling. As someone with no expertise on the North, I found the discussion by Cwiertka to be revealing and unbiased. This chapter shows the role of the state in shaping both the agrarian model and the consumer foodstuffs of the North. The author also examines the famine of the 1990s and the various reasons—both external and internal—for that catastrophic situation. While it seems that much information coming out of the North should be taken with an ample measure of salt, the discussion of the “typical” diet in the North was quite interesting.

In short, this is an excellent volume that will be of use in undergraduate history and culture classes on Korea and for scholars who wish to learn more about the processes that created the Korean cuisine that we see in twenty-first-century Korea.