For centuries massive meals amazed visitors to Korea (2019)
75 comments
·October 13, 2025Terr_
erulabs
Rice makes quite a good currency, especially if you only have one primary cultivar. It's relatively fungible and dried white rice more or less lasts forever without spoiling. It's quite nice it has the side effect of also literally being food. If rice had been common in Rome, we might still be paying taxes in rice.
dluan
It's still used for bribes in Japan, where earlier this year the agriculture minister was sacked for receiving gifts of rice in the middle of a nationwide rice shortage. His replacement still has an outside chance to become the next prime minister.
vkou
> we might still be paying taxes in rice.
As long as the largest form of economic activity was agriculture, and access to hard currency was limited, people were paying taxes with food (or labour in their landlord's fields).
We pay taxes in money because we have a diversified economy, where 90% of us are not subsistence peasants, and the money supply & availability of banking is large enough that we (or our employers) have cash on hand.
fluoridation
>We pay taxes in money because we have a diversified economy
It's all a fiction, though. Ultimately wealth can be translated to very raw things, like energy, space, and time. Using rice as currency is not too different from using Joules as currency, as it's ultimately just captured and stored solar radiation. The issue with using food as money is not that the economy is diverse, as it's ultimately for the most part powered by people eating. The issue is that if you spend money to make a km^2 of land usable for factories that produce, say, semiconductors, that's not exactly translatable to tons of rice.
vintermann
One thing that has stuck me in old tax records is that when taxes were paid in natura according to fixed exchange rates (e.g. one cow is two sheep, one measure of butter is three squirrel skins etc.), then government probably actually valued some income more than others. The "market value" of these goods almost certainly didn't match the fixed exchange rates, but people's ability to trade for the best tax unit were also limited (and often legally restricted to the same exchange rates!).
So e.g. pastoralists who paid their tax in actual skins may have been more valued than people who paid their tax in "a skins worth" of grain.
I wonder if there's some good books on this sort of thing.
imtringued
>Another historical connection might be how the weird status of silver and gold are linked to European colonization.
Land is a finite resource so people fight over it. If you make your money a finite resource, then people will fight over money as well. It's not very complicated.
shihab
> To Koreans, they looked more like sauce bowls, leading them to conclude that the Japanese had starved themselves to stretch out the siege.
As a Bengali man, that's exactly how I felt when I came to USA and first visited japanese restaurants. Part of the reason we consume so much rice is that rice is kind of the main dish (not a side)- it literally takes up central and most of the space in your food plate.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%E0%A6%87%E0%A6%B2%E...
teleforce
Typical Japanese will devour their small rice bowl until there's none of rice grain is left over, since they're taught from the very young age not to waste food.
Most of other Asian nations will not eat their rice until it's completely finished. Even with their most delicious biryani dish there're always many rice grains left in the plate. I think the small bowl make it much easier to completely consume the rice unlike the big bowl or plate.
nirava
The Japanese mostly eat sticky rice, which is very easy to eat and "clean up" even with a chopstick.
The Indian subcontinent eat long-grain Basmati or similar rice which fluff up into individual grains on the plate. It doesn't make sense to individually pick out single leftover grains.
In nearly every culture is the idea of "Annapurna" or the god of food, and wasting food is generally frowned upon and considered bad table manners. I've been scolded plenty of times as a child for not cleaning up my plate in Nepal.
I wouldn't attribute it to small bowls at least. The Japanese instilling good virtues into their children almost institutionally perhaps plays some part in it, but also some of it is just physics.
dayjaby
Having had grandparents live through WWII (or any other war to be fair) also helps instill this attitude. I can barely imagine what kind of famines they had to endure.
ignoramous
Wasting food is faux pas in many a eastern cultures, including South Asian & Middle Eastern.
hbarka
Ilish fish also known as hilsa, the king of fish. That’s one delicious fish.
ListeningPie
What happened to all the excess calories they are eating? Huge bowl of rice, table filled with food, and the people look almost malnourished.
NaomiLehman
probably eating once a week
1cool
For centuries, Korean peasants lacked food and endlessly complained of hunger but I won't cherry pick random historical (and foreign) observations to support it.
preommr
> One man in my parish is aged between 30 and 45, and in a bet he ate seven bowls—and that’s not counting the bowls of rice wine he drank. One old man, aged 64 or 65, said he had no appetite, and finished five bowls.
Surprisingly comical record-keeping.
block_dagger
What do you find comical about it?
n1b0m
Well the part about the old man contains irony: he claimed to have no appetite, but his action of finishing five bowls of food is the opposite of what he said.
BrandoElFollito
Reading the comments here and elsewhere, and these from my Korean friends -- this is not reflected in Korean restaurants, at least in France.
I have tried a few in and around Paris (the latest was yesterday, a small family-run one lost in some random street), and the food is at best normal size, and less positively massively overpriced.
You usually get 3 tiny plates (with two leaves of kimchi, to give some context) and a normal plate of food + a small bowl of rice.
This is enough for my French stomach, but reading about the lavish servings and whatnot, this may just be a local thing.
decimalenough
> Daedong-beob unified the various forms of taxes to a single kind: rice. This, in effect, made growing rice equivalent to growing money, encouraging even more production than strictly necessary.
This is not much of an explanation, since feudal Japan had basically the same system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kokudaka
tetris11
maybe Japan's feudal lords were more corrupt, disincentivizing production. Whereas Koreans paid directly to the king
zkmon
Similar situation in South India too. Eating culture is shaped by foods available. Here in western world, I'm shocked by how little rice they serve at my office lunch and at restaurants (we call it as cat food). I usually eat 4-6 times of that rice per meal at home. Still my people make a special observation that I eat very less food at home.
writebetterc
I'm sure that if you went back 100 years you'd be less surprised, but of course the rice would've been replaced with oat porridge or potatoes.
pjc50
The old European one would have been bread: the traditional 2lb/900g ish size loaf would have been consumed in a day. Apparently Turkey still has very high levels of bread consumption.
pjmlp
Germany as well, it is like bread with everything, sometimes feels like back in the middle age, using bread as plates.
wagwang
A korean meal is only limited by the size of the table. I've visited resturants in korea where there were no less than 30 plates that came out of 1 set meal.
rurban
I've visited Turkish breakfast restaurants, where the whole family sits around a table with 50-80 plates of various stuff, for about 15€. Eating needs 2 hours.
mock-possum
What do they do with all the food that doesn’t get eaten?
Flowsion
There's not much leftover, as they are served in small little sauce-like plates. It's pretty frowned upon to ask for more banchan if you aren't going to finish it.
But yes, the leftover dishes are thrown away.
wrp
A substantial restaurant meal in Korea is usually served with several standard side dishes. Due to the expense and effort of providing these to each table, restaurants often require a minimum party size of two. Also, I'm not sure if it's illegal or just gross, but if a dish looks untouched, sketchier places will sometimes just pass it along to the next customer.
kragen
Usually there isn't much. The plates are tiny and mostly have vegetables.
coarise
You eat them.
fuzzer371
As someone who works in food service, that sounds like a nightmare, not just to prepare but to bring all of that to the table.
n1b0m
Nah it’s pretty easy https://youtube.com/shorts/OC0Bdc2Ks0o?si=xTioDi1DmyocrRVC
kijin
Most restaurants of this style have the full set pre-arranged on trays, stacked on shelves, ready to serve. Most of the banchan are a combination of dry, fermented, and strongly seasoned, so they don't spoil easily. When it's time to clean up, all the plates stack neatly on top of one another.
In terms of the total number of plates that the staff needs to serve and clean, it's probably not much different from a European meal that consists of several courses.
sbinnee
It was a fun reading as a Korean and my hometown Jeonju was even mentioned! My partner is non-Korean and I can definitely tell the difference in rice consumption for sure. I can eat much more much faster. But the funny thing is she can eat more bread faster than me.
AndrewThrowaway
Anecdotal story. Once I stumbled into Korean restaurant in China Town in NYC. I just ordered something like lunch. I was alone. They kept bringing plates after plates of various dishes. I was ashamed to leave so much food. Paid like 11 dollars but it was in ~2015.
JumpCrisscross
Come back and try KTown on 32nd. (Get off the ground floors.)
$20 will buy a good meal. $40, decadence. (Avant alcohol.)
jjangkke
i been to a museum that showed what Koreans in the 16th century ate with and I was shocked to find how huge the spoon and bowls were. It's not uncommon to find very tall Koreans 6ft and up these days but they are eating a lot less so I wonder how they've become all so tall.
Izikiel43
More protein
lifestyleguru
[flagged]
> Daedong-beob unified the various forms of taxes to a single kind: rice. This, in effect, made growing rice equivalent to growing money, encouraging even more production than strictly necessary.
This is still relevant these days, whenever someone talks about linking a currency (and taxes collected in that currency) to a commodity like gold. The market for the metal becomes distorted, and the overall economy distorted as well, vulnerable to anything that might impacts the the mining or refinement of the metal.
Another historical connection might be how the weird status of silver and gold are linked to European colonization.