Consumption, Class, and the Cosmopolitan in Twenty-First-Century South Korean Culinary Dramas

Abstract This article examines South Korean television dramas set in culinary workplaces in the first two decades of the twenty-first century as an integral site of the dialectical globalization of Korean media, technology, cuisine, and culture. The explosion of food media in the twenty-first century created a dizzying landscape of platforms and genres focused on the production, consumption, and visual aesthetics of food across the globe. Food media has gone far beyond pedagogic how-to programs and cookbooks to become a mainstay of competition shows, reality TV, chat shows, and social media that create communal knowledge-based communities. The media’s infatuation with food extends to fictional narratives in television, film, and literature, inviting critical inquiry into the significatory power of people’s relationships to food as a reflection of larger social issues. Food-themed dramas tell the story of South Korean society’s move from developmental nationalism to cosmopolitan globalism and the complex economic, political, and social factors underlying this shift. Narrated through the romantic coupling of working-class acquisition of cosmopolitan taste and transnational elites’ “rediscovery” of local ingenuity, culinary dramas reflect an emerging dissatisfaction with the distribution of postdevelopmental South Korea’s successes and a desire for upward mobility via globalized consumption.