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Modern Day Korean Culture

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Korean culture is comprised of a multitude of societal changes that have amounted and transformed throughout the years. Beginning five thousand years ago Korea has slowly evolved into a cultural haven. Music, dance, painting, food, fashion, arts, games, karate, family life, theater, religion and beliefs are just a few components that make up modern day Korean culture. Korean cuisine is one of the most unifying of all of these cultural factors. The food in Korea is one of the defining elements of Koreans culture because of its historical background, environmental affinities, long lasting creative techniques and recipes, and use in traditional ceremonies and festivals. Modern day cuisine in Korea is quite progressed from what it once started …show more content…

The exchange of food boded well for all countries involved. New cultural foods were being shown to Korea that they had never before seen. Not only did trade with other countries introduce a variety of new foods to Korea, Western missionaries traveling through Korea also proved to be a huge component in cultural cuisine exchange.
After the fall of Joseon Dynasty, there was a thirty-six year period of colonization by the government of Japan. With Japan in power, the adoption of many Japanese cultural ways, including agricultural techniques and systems, was inevitable. Some of these new techniques involved combining smaller farms into large-scale farms to help yield a larger amount of crops, which would be exported to Japan. The problem was that although crop production, especially rice production, was increasing most of these crops were being shipped out of the country. To make up for this loss, Koreans also began to increase the production of grains such as millet and barley for Korean use only. Under Japanese control, the way meals were eaten and served also changed Korean’s lives. Koreans began to eat only two meals a day during cold season and three a day during warm seasons. The meals became very repetitive with little variation on a day-to-day basis. The lower levels of society would share a single bowl of white rice and the rest of their meals were

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