By Michael Breen
The revelation last year that tourists like to eat food has led to a lot of talk about how to make Korean cuisine famous around the world.
To those engaged in this endeavor, I would suggest a study of British food. Millions of people visit Great Britain every year from all over the world in order to eat there. How did this small country, which had been a victim of Chinese, Indian, Italian and American fast-food restaurants for so long achieve this amazing turnaround?
The key to the success of British cuisine is that it is based on what people eat at home. An early strategic decision for the industry was to make a clear distinction between breakfast and lunch.
Breakfast, as the name suggests, is the first meal you have after a period without food, so it is important to go easy on the stomach. That's why British people at home eat Corn Flakes or Weetabix, with milk and sugar. Another popular option is toast and marmalade and a cup of tea.
On the rare occasions when they eat breakfast out, such as at the airport or in a hotel, British people eat a cooked breakfast. This is known as the Full English and consists of fried eggs, fried bread, fried bacon, fried sausages, fried tomatoes, fried mushrooms, and, for roughage, baked beans. In Scotland, you get it with black pudding, which is made of cow's blood.
Lunch is built around the concept of meat and two veg. The staple vegetable is the potato and popular second vegetables are usually green, with the exception of carrots, which are not. British people only eat Yorkshire pudding on Sundays.
It is widely assumed that Britons eat fish and chips at home. This is only partly true. Yes, the dish is eaten at home, but it is almost always bought from a specialist fish and chip shop, where it is wrapped in a newspaper to keep it warm. Another famous dish is toad-in-the-hole, made with sausages cooked in Yorkshire pudding. The name was a marketing idea from someone who thought that the bit of sausage sticking out looked like a toad's head. In the army, it is known as turd-in-the-blanket.
What can the promoters of Korean cuisine learn from this? Should we separate breakfast from other meals and save the kimchi until lunchtime? That might be a good idea.
I would also recommend picking one type of tea, as the British have done, and making it the main one. My favorite is milk coffee, as dispensed from vending machines.
Note that British tea is actually from China and India. That doesn't matter. Tea does not recognize borders. Nor does red pepper, which is why Korea doesn't have to acknowledge Portugal's role in the history of kimchi.
Connected to this, note how British food promotion avoids words like ``traditional" and ``authentic" and ``royal." This humble approach makes good commercial sense. If you think about it, you wouldn't eat an ``authentic traditional" meal every day. You'd just try it once.
To make this point another way, nationalism should be left at home in tourism promotion. Think about it. Would you visit a country that implicitly said, ``Come spend your money and then leave, you foreign bastards"? Only Australia could get away with that. The purpose of promoting Korean food is to attract tourists. This is a commercial exercise that should not be hijacked by patriotic purists.
The irony is that familiarity with other cuisines can make your own better. Some people might think that British cuisine is only famous because as a colonial power, Britain forced people around the world to eat it. This is not the case. You don't see toad-in-the-hole in India and America and other British colonies. It was hard in those days to preserve food well, so colonial sailors ate locally wherever they stopped.
The exceptions were biscuits, which traveled well because they were dry, and rum, which helped sailors get through the day at sea. The biscuit is now famous. Rum is not so famous because it tastes horrendously. And that's the real key to food. It's got to taste good. Korean food will do well because, when cooked well, it tastes great.
Michael Breen is chairman of Insight Communications Consultants Exclusive Partner of FD International. He can be reached at mike.breen@insightcomms.com.