November 22 is Kimchi Day.
If you eat kimchi, then you better be for the liberation of all oppressed people from all Empires.
Over 4000 years ago, Koreans developed methods to store food even during the cold winter months, a time when it was very hard to find and cultivate food. One of these methods was by pickling radishes and eventually cabbages and other vegetables.
This fermentation enabled Kimchi to be a dish available to everyone regardless of class status because of the availability of the ingredients and also the process.
And this time of the year, the end of November, beginning of December is often when kimjang happened.
Kimjang is when families, communities, and even whole villages come together to make large batches of kimchi for the winter. It is a matrilineal practice, with elders in the center of the kimchi wisdom.
Even though now, because of refrigerators, kimchi can be made at any time of the year, kimjang still takes place in communities, families, and villages. There are now over 200 types of kimchi today.
Kimchi is essential to every Korean meal and is always on the table along with rice and a soup. Those are the bare foundational items that make up a Korean meal. It is also healthy for you because of the nutrients and unique fermentation benefits.
Kimchi is a part of Korea’s cultural identity and national pride.
Many of us were not allowed to bring kimchi to work or school, because of white supremacy. So to now witness the world consuming it everywhere is a trip. Thinking about how my mother who had immigrated from Korea was not allowed to bring her home-made Kimchi in her lunches to work when it was perhaps one of the only grounding parts she had available to her, and now to see white people trying to call everything pickled kimchi is enraging.
Even for myself, being called Kimchi as an insult by racist bullies, and as an adult, people saying, “I love kimchi” as their first sentence when people find out I’m Korean. All of that is racist, by the way.
So if you eat or like kimchi at all, you better honor the amount of ancestral work it took to bring it to you.
And that ancestral work has meant fighting colonialism, classism, anti-immigrant sentiment, anti-Asian racism, ageism, sexism, and more.
So if you eat that ancestral work of my people, do not forget that the history of resistance has fermented to get all the way here. Until all Empires fall. Kimchi forever.
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