Seaweed Soup
In Korea, it is tradition to eat seaweed soup on your birthday. Nobody really likes the taste of seaweed soup, but the tradition because of a nutrition quirk that was discovered long before people really understood such things. Originally, women were fed seaweed soup as their primary food for one month following childbirth. Seaweed apparently is helpful in the healing process because of its high Iodine content (which was figured out later). The tradition of mothers eating primarily seaweed soup is still prevolent, even today.
Anyway, this tradition turned into a funny story today at work. One of the Korean Kim Labs employees had a birthday today, and to celebrate Katy decided she would make him Korean soup. Katy made two versions: one the traditional way, and one that was of her own concoction that involved additional tasty ingredients. When the Korean coworkers tried the soup, they burst out laughing. Apparently there are two types of seaweed, one that is used only in broths, and the other that is actually eaten. Katy chose the wrong one. You can’t really blame her, ’cause you don’t really get trained in cooking with seaweed in the central U.S. Plus the packing for the seaweed is completely in Korean, so you can’t even read what it says. The Koreans at work found this pretty funny, though, and they’re even talking about submitting it to a Korean newspaper as a cute story about an American trying to honor them with their traditions.
November 10th, 2007 at 3:15 pm
hello, i stumbled onto your blog while trying to look up how the seaweed soup became a Korean birthday tradition. i made a birthday dinner for my mom yesterday including this soup. did the Korean people at your work tell you that “nobody really likes the taste of seaweed soup”??? because it actually tastes really great. of course you need to make it correctly..