• Korean Journal of Community Nutrition
• /
• v.25 no.2
• /
• pp.137-149
• /
• 2020

Objectives: This study explored the community food environmental factors affecting food purchasing using a qualitative research methodology for the elderly as well as the various food environments under their socioeconomic diversity. Methods: For the qualitative data collection, this study interviewed 20 elderly people aged 65 years or more, who participated in a public health program or lunch services operated by the senior welfare center in Seoul. Five dimensions, such as availability, physical accessibility, affordability, acceptability, and accommodation suggested in previous studies, were used to identify the community food environmental factors. Results: The elderly participants showed overall similarities to the concepts derived from existing studies on the five dimensions of food accessibility environment. In addition, other important food accessibility environmental factors that were not present in previous studies, such as acceptability for a product of domestic origin, delivery service to home, and small-packaged food sales, were derived. On the other hand, the concept of some subjects differed depending on the household income and specifically for the physical accessibility concept. This showed that the close distance factor from a grocery store at home might not apply to older adults in low-income households in Korea. Conclusions: This study found that five dimensions of the food environment suggested by previous studies could also be applied to vulnerable older adults in Korea. On the other hand, the socioeconomic characteristics of individuals and households would affect the perspectives of their local food environments differently. The findings of this study could help in the development of tools for evaluating the community food environment.

• Korean Journal of Agricultural Science
• /
• v.45 no.3
• /
• pp.547-559
• /
• 2018

Consumers are becoming increasingly interested in what kind of value their food has. Many studies have focused on consumers' preferences and willingness to pay for specific food values. However, few studies have asked consumers to consider or rank the importance of different food values. This paper determined consumers' food values by implementing the best-worst scaling approach and segmented consumers based on the relative importance of general food values that consumers place on them. Among a list of eleven food values (taste, safety, origin, appearance, price, environmental impact, naturalness, convenience, nutrition, fairness, and habit) which was compiled from previous studies on food preferences, on average, safety, nutrition, taste, and price were the most important values to consumers, whereas fairness, habit, appearance, convenience, origin, and environmental impact were the least important values. However, significant variation exists among consumers in terms of the relative importance of food values. To investigate the heterogeneity among consumers, a Latent Class Analysis was performed to classify consumers into subgroups based on responses to questions. Two latent classes were found and characterized as 'safety-nutrition' and 'taste-price'. The 'safety-nutrition' cluster represents 61% of the sample and a group of people who find safety and nutrition centered values to be the most important. Another cluster represents about 39% of the sample, and relative to the first group, this group finds price and taste values to be more important.

• English & American cultural studies
• /
• v.18 no.3
• /
• pp.65-92
• /
• 2018

According to Wenying Xu, Asian American literature abounds in culinary metaphors and references (8); subsequently, a growing number of critics have begun to recognize that food "feeds into the literary rendering of Asian American subjectivity [and] provides a language through which to imagine Asian alterity in the American imagination" (Mannur 13). Ann Mah's Kitchen Chinese: A Novel about Food, Family, and Finding Yourself (2010) is yet another text within which to investigate how food "operates as one of the key cultural signs that structure people's identities" (Xu 2). Even as Kitchen Chinese insists on underscoring that Chinese food, as much as the voyage to her "motherland" China, is critical to protagonist Isabelle's quest to gain a better understanding of herself, we are able to observe how Isabelle exploits Chinese culture and its foodways as "food pornography" in order to align herself with mainstream America. Needless to say, the novels' relegation of Chinese food as "food porn" is problematic in that it encourages readers to participate in the exoticization of Asia and its culture, and the reduction of its people as the other. Ultimately, this essay aims to consider how the consumption and rejection of food becomes a critical means by which the Asian American subject fashions her identity.

• Korean Journal of Food Science and Technology
• /
• v.11 no.4
• /
• pp.314-321
• /
• 1979

• Journal of the East Asian Society of Dietary Life
• /
• v.21 no.1
• /
• pp.1-13
• /
• 2011

The number of North Korean refugees residing in the Republic of Korea (South) has reached 17,000, and this number is expected to exceed 20,000 (North Korean Supporter's Association, 2009). Refugees have developed improper dietary habits while hiding and escaping North Korea. They have also developed preferences for exotic food. This thesis attempts determine the changes in Korean food. This study also describes the view on South Korean food by North Korean refugees. According to our survey, women refugees had better dietary habits than men. Moreover, women and those in their 40's showed a tendency to choose food based on quality over quantity. Both men and women refugees responded that they cook food based on North Korean recipes. Those who view their current financial status as average or higher stated that South Korean food is tastier than North Korean food. Those whose financial status among North Koreans was average or higher when they lived in North Korea appreciated the splendor and beauty of South Korean food more. The results of this study are expected to assist in determining the differences in dietary habits between those from the North compared to Koreans living in the Republic of Korea. Therefore, studies between South and North Korean food should continue.

• Journal of Families and Better Life
• /
• v.31 no.4
• /
• pp.15-31
• /
• 2013

Consumers are quite worried about food safety because food is one of the most important necessities in everyday life. Many studies have been conducted regarding the food safety issues, however, most researches have focused only on a limited range of risk factors and used only quantitative survey methods. The purpose of this study was to investigate consumers' perceptions of the risky components of food safety and how the perceptions have been formed. For this study in-depth interviews were conducted. For the interviewees, nine housewives, who are in their 30s to 50s, were selected taking into consideration their age, education level, number of children, and employment status. Results showed that the risk factors many consumers worried about were agricultural pesticides, MSG, food additives, GMO, Mad Cow Disease, preservatives, and growth hormones, etc. Consumers were worried about the risk of the retail process the most because they thought it was not informed and controlled well. Consumers tend to worry much more when the risks are involuntary, uncontrollable, unreliable, and have a gradual negative effect. Some of the food safety-oriented behaviors of consumers were also investigated.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Food Culture
• /
• v.4 no.4
• /
• pp.375-382
• /
• 1989

About 760 papers and patents of the traditional fermented food in Korea were collected which were published during 1917-1988, and then the papers were classified, outlined and reviewed. Study of traditional fermented food was about 10% of total study on Korean Foods, and that of alcoholic beverage was 50%, soy sauce and related product was 30% and kimchi was less than 20% of total study of traditional fermented foods. Though considerable amount of studies were accomplished before the World War II, but a few study was accomplished during the Korean war. The research activity is, hitherto, increasing gradually, but the systematic studies were rarely done. The studies to be investigated were processing quality of raw materials, classification, standardization, sensory quality of the product and so on.

• English & American cultural studies
• /
• v.17 no.1
• /
• pp.1-25
• /
• 2017

This essay investigates how the industrialization of the US food system was closely linked to US foreign policy, gender issues, and the rise of consumerism in the Cold War era. While many scholars in American studies and women's studies over the past few decades have paid increasing attention to the interrelationship of gender politics and the media industry in shaping US domesticity, they have seldom studied how and why reading gender issues in relation to environmental discourse in general and the industrialized US food system in particular can help us better understand the complex relationship between environmental and social problems that we are facing today, both collectively and individually. In this context, this essay shows how US national politics have not only created the ideal of American domesticity that promotes traditional gender roles and consumerism at the expense of gender equality, but also negatively affected women's somatic and mental health writ large. By closely examining the cultural implications of Nixon's and Khrushchev's Kitchen Debate in the 1950s alongside newspapers, photographs, advertisements, and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1963), I argue that reading Cold War consumer culture in relation to the US food system leads readers to see the invisible links between gender politics and today's environmental and social problems in comparative and global contexts.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Food Culture
• /
• v.35 no.6
• /
• pp.553-568
• /
• 2020

This systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to determine whether food intake is effective in preventing diseases related to cognitive impairment. We searched English databases namely MEDLINE, PubMed and ScienceDirect from 2000 to May 2020, and Korean databases namely RISS, KISS, and DBPIA from 1990 to May 2020. We divided the data into 15 groups using the food group classification of the Korean Nutrition Society (KNS). The effect size (Cohen's d) was estimated using a random-effect model, and a 95% confidence interval was calculated for each study. We included 17 cross-sectional studies and 7 cohort studies which involved 45,115 participants. As a result of analyzing the subgroups in the Asian population of both sexes, it was observed that grain intake has a protective effect against cognitive impairment. For females, pulses and fish also have a protective role against cognitive impairment. In the case of seaweed, a negative relationship was found with a moderate protective effect against cognitive impairment (Cohen's d:-0.533, 95% CI: -0.939, -0.126; p=0.010) in Korean studies. Dairy products are associated with an increased risk of cognitive impairment in the American and European population but drinking alcohol is associated with a lower impairment risk. These results provide a basis for formulating the dietary guidelines for preventing dementia for each country.

• Toxicological Research
• /
• v.1 no.1
• /
• pp.17-30
• /
• 1985

Mycotoxins are a group of toxicants giving a risk potential to human health in connection with the daily food intake. Food commodities once contaminated with mycotoxins can not be detoxified by any economic means and prevention was suggested as the only measure. In order to minimize the economic loss and health hazard posed by mycotoxins and toxicoses, systematic and toxicological studies on the subject should be undertaken. Most reports in Korea were concentrated on the mycological studies of relatively easy techniques and the confirmation or quantitation of mycotoxins was rarely done. Research topics to be undertaken in future may be exemplifid below: (1) Establishing assay methods for individual or multi-residue of mycotoxins (2) Monitoring of mycotoxins for suspicious food or feed samples in Korea (3) Epidemiological survey of mycotoxicoses (4) Etiological survey of disease outbreaks associated with mycotoxins (5) Accumulation of testing method and data on the toxicity of mycotoxins (6) Legal regulation to control mycotoxins and development of their detoxification / elimination methods