Why hello there and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophes, I’m Jon O’Guin, and today’s post is a weird one, but one that I think is super fun, and a great way to use food in a work of fiction. We’re going to talk about food as a vehicle for narrative/theme, and how incredibly exact/precise details can communicate SO MUCH to the correct audience, through the recent Best Picture winner Parasite.

If you haven’t seen the film, don’t worry, we’re not going to spoil any important plot details of the film: we’re not going to say ANYTHING about the film as a whole that you wouldn’t see in a Netflix teaser or back-of-the-box segment, and we’re going to focus on just a couple precise seconds of dialogue. As long as you’re okay with that, let’s push on and get to the good stuff.

Dining With the Enemy

As a VERY brief, very vague summary: Parasite is a South Korean film about a struggling lower class family where the oldest son gets employed by a very wealthy family, where he helps his other family members get jobs helping the wealthy family, who turn out to be pretty inept at day-to-day life. It’s a film about classism, broadly: the name is intended to be technically applicable to either family, with the poor people essentially conning the rich family (they pretend to not know each other very well, so that the wealthy family pays all of them individually), but the rich family’s NEED for people to handle their day-to-day lives is also portrayed as parasitic.

Beautiful home, though.

The scene we’re going to look at is amazing to me, as a nerd of food, linguistics, cultural inertia, and so on, it’s an exchange that perfectly encapsulates and explores ALL of those things in a way that the film-makers struggled to translate for American audiences. And it’s all focused on what American audiences were told is a dish of Ram-Don, and what’s called in Korea chapaguri.

Both words are portmanteaus, smashing two words into one: Ram-don refers to the two types of noodles involved in the dish, Ramen and Udon. And while that conveys the physical meaning of the dish, it fails to cover the cultural import of what the Korean name gives audiences. Because the Korean portmanteau is not of the noodles, but of the brands involved; Chapaghetti and Neoguri.

Using My Noodle

If you’re not a Weeb, an instant noodle expert, or legitimately Asian, those brand names are probably gibberish to you. But allow me to give you the context.

Chapaghetii is a brand that…oh man, we get to go even fucking DEEPER into the portmanteau and history here!

How much pain and fear has come from such a little thing.

Chapaghetti is a brand of instant noodles that is named as a portmanteau of spaghetti and jajangmyeon. That may look confusing, but it helps if you know how similar the sounds of “ja” and “cha” are in Korean. (and, actually, in English. Say “check jack” quickly, and you’ll see) Jajangmyeon is a Korean dish based off a Chinese dish zha jiang mian, a phrase I did NOT have to look up to spell because I was actually considering making it for the site and using it as an example of another recipe like Dan Dan Noodles. The name means “fried sauce noodles”, and uses a sweet black bean paste (tianmian in Chinese, Chanjung for the Korean version) as the backbone of the sauce. This is where the spaghetti connection comes in: if Hoisin sauce is the barbecue sauce of Chinese cuisine, and Soy Sauce is the ketchup of Chinese food, then Tianmian is Tomato Paste. These dishes are basically the spaghetti Bolognese of Asia.

Neoguri is ANOTHER instant noodle brand (this one very popular in South Korea) that is a thicker noodled ramyeon (Korean for Ramen) in a spicy seafood-flavored broth.

There’s the Udon from Ram-Don, by the way.

Chapaguri is a popular snack that is, as its name implies, just MIXING packets of Neoguri and Chapaghetti. It’s two instant noodles mixed together. It is at MOST a $5 meal and that’s if you decided to fry an egg and add it, or your stores are gouging you. You could get it for $2.50 if buying in bulk.

That’s what I mean when I say that the classist element is missing from the Ram-Don translation. And I’m not trying to beat up Darcy Paquet here. Paquet was the translator who wrote the subtitles, and thus “localized” the phrases for American audiences. And that is a ROUGH job, and one fraught with issues, where you want to cling to what is being conveyed, but in a way that the new audience understands. So, for instance, at another point in the movie, he replaces the name of a prestigious Korean university with Oxford, because what you need to understand is the connotations of wealth, power, and class in that university. At another point, a character refers to a group of Here he faced a double issue: he had to convey both what the dish PHYSICALLY IS, so audiences aren’t confused when they see it, and what it means, without breaking the flow of the scene to pause and explain, as I just had the time and space to do, decades of Korean culinary history.

And we’re not even DONE. Because the dish is actually TWO components. And it’s the second one that really hits home the point.

Getting to the Meat of the Matter

In the film, the rich mother instructs her housekeeper to make some Ramdon for dinner, and adds “There’s sirloin in the fridge, add that too.” Now, that’s already some bougie shit. If I told you I added sliced steak to my Top Ramen, you’d think I was an asshole. (Spoilers: I am 70% sure I have, at some point, done this. In my defense, it was left-over steak.) But it gets worse, amigos.

Picture by Colin Charles, from Flickr.com

You wanna know how expensive this meat is? There aren’t even free PICTURES of it.
Alright, they’re free, but I have to LINK the source.

See, “sirloin” is another localization of the text in that line. And it’s one I would call a mistake. Because a better word would be “ribeye”, or “chateaubriand”, or “wagyu”. The steak she is telling the housekeeper to add to the dish isn’t just a “sirloin steak” it’s Hanu (or Hanwoo) steak, a prime beef from cattle raised in South Korea (and maybe North Korea, but let’s be real, those cows aren’t doing well) that is a prime meat. So much so that the only location I could find willing to give me a price put it at $484 per pound. Sorry, 484 HONG KONG dollars per pound, or roughly $62 a pound USD.

THAT’S the stinger. If the rich family had just asked for Chapaguri, that would have been one thing. It actually could have been a semi-redemptive/bonding point: Chapaguri is very popular with Koreans of all income levels. It would be like a rich person asking for…Campbell’s Tomato Soup and Grilled Cheese because they had a cold. Or a box of Kraft Mac and Cheese. It would stand out as a moment showing the rich and the poor can like and eat the same thing despite their differences. And then she casually adds “And throw 70 dollars of steak into that.”

The Indulgent Point

Binging with Babish, in his attempt to contextualize/localize the explanation for his audience, described it as “asking for a Big Mac with black truffles”, and I’d disagree with him, because a Big Mac is like, $5-6, and it’s fast food. Part of the convenience is someone else made it for you. This is more like “Add some lobster to my Top Ramen”, or “Make me Spongebob Kraft Mac and Cheese with some caviar.” That’s the context that you, the American audience, lost in translation. And it’s the same context, the same attention to detail, which makes that punch really land with Korean audiences.

And I think that’s a great thing for fiction to hit: Food can so often serve a narrative or thematic purpose in stories, and too many creators fail to cover it. Food is such a universal experience, but by playing with the specifics of it, you can really SAY things. And you already know this: how often in a comedy does the story convey that the main character is out-of-their-depth, or in a culture they don’t understand by showing them having to eat food they don’t get?

Fun Fact about this scene: It’s actually a failed attempt at the kind of cultural detail I’m praising.
The foods they serve at this dinner are actually disgusting to just many Indians (actually, mathematically, MORE Indians) as they are to Western audiences and the goal was to sicken the Americans so they would leave quicker. (Hell, at least one of the dishes is ACTIVELY POISONOUS)
Unfortunately, they don’t explain that very well in the movie, so people just thought they were being super Racist to India.

Food speaks to so many things, and carries so many things. That’s the great academic goal of this very site: to show you the secret histories and origins of the food you eat, to mark and explain them so that they’re no longer scary. You can cook French Dips without fear because you know they’re just some sandwich invented in a Diner, maybe by accident. You can make home-fries without fear, chuckling as you remember the guy who hired men to guard potatoes poorly. I am attempting to localize all of food for you, to make it understandable. That’s our theme.

And also, now I REALLY want to make some goddamn instant noodles.

This kind comes with mini-narutomaki, for extra Asian power.
Actually, since this is legitimately a Korean noodle package, it’s whatever they call naruto in Korea. Eobok? I don’t know why I’m asking you.

MONDAY: JON CORNS BEEF, FOR THE FUTURE, FROM THE PAST

THURSDAY: WE CAN HOPE JON’S WORKED OUT SOMETHING WORTH DOING BY MONDAY.