Beyond pojangmacha: Edae food carts and the future of Seoul’s social gastronomy

ABSTRACT

Across Seoul, Korea, countless tented food stalls called pojangmacha have for generations purveyed cheap, tasty fare from early evening unto the wee hours of the night. The foods sold are familiar nosh that can be washed down with beer or soju. But while these foods are as popular as ever, in recent years, other sorts of street food that are decidedly more “international” have emerged. One such place is Ewhayeodae Street that leads to the front gate of Ewha Womans University, aka Edae. While other places in Seoul are better known for the quality, quantity, and variety of new street foods, it is Edae that helps us to best assess two particular facets of contemporary Korea’s ongoing social, cultural, and economic transformation: first, the status of women, such as those who attend Ewha University, and second, the rise in foreign tourists. Using inter- and multidisciplinary sources and analysis, this speculative, nonempirical essay postulates that the Edae food carts, in offering new and innovative foods that appeal simultaneously to these two groups, anticipate an urgent social reality: the future of Seoul continues to hinge on both the ongoing evolution of the status of women and the internationalization of the country.

KEYWORDS:

• Pojangmacha
• street food
• Seoul
• tourism
• status of women
• internationalism
• cult of masculinity
• alcohol consumption
• Ewha Womans University
• Korean Wave

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robert Ji-Song Ku

Robert Ji-Song Ku is an associate professor in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies at Binghamton University of the State University of New York. He is the author of Dubious Gastronomy: The Cultural Politics of Eating Asian in the USA (University of Hawaii Press, 2013) and co-editor of three books: Future Yet to Come: Sociotechnical Imaginaries in Modern Korea (University of Hawaii Press, forthcoming 2021), Pop Empires: Transnational and Diasporic Flows of India and Korea (University of Hawaii Press, 2019) and Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader (New York University Press, 2014). His current book project is tentatively titled “Korean Food in the Age of K-pop.”

Jungah Kim

Jungah Kim received an MA in English from Sogang University in Seoul, Korea, and is currently a doctoral candidate of English at Texas A&M University. Her primary research interest is Victorian literature with an emphasis on women novelists, travel literature, nomadic theory, and posthumanism.

Hyunjoo Yu

Hyunjoo Yu is a doctoral candidate in English at Texas A&M University. Her dissertation project takes a comparative ethnic studies approach and explores the issue of racist biopolitics and liberal aesthetics reflected in nineteenth-century women of color writers’ fiction.