The Propaganda of Kimchi

Recently I went to the Kimchi museum at the Seoul World Trade Center. Being in Korea, I just had to see what they had to say about the one side dish that has become the center of a nation's pride. That's quite a title to be held for what is often described as "pickled cabbage."
However, even in this museum I have found evidence of a propaganda that permeates throughout the country. Actually, it's not so much evidence, but the lack of evidence.
There is simply no mention about the origins of Kimchi's two most important ingredients: chili pepper and garlic.

Bullshit: Kimchi is a purely and uniquely Korean product.
The Truth: Without the Columbian exchange, Kimchi would not be anything like it is today.

Why this is significant:
There is this belief that anything purely Korean is good and anything foreign is suspect or at the very least, unpatriotic. Imagine back in the 1600s when garlic and chili pepper first entered Korea. There probably wasn't anything more alien than those two strange plant products. One grew in the ground and had a strong taste and smell (more so than jinseng), the other was a long "fruit" of sorts which was not sweet but burned your mouth.
It was as ALIEN as you could ever get.
Yet now it is a part of a uniquely Korean side dish.
But credit for as to where garlic and chili comes from seems to be some sort of secret, as if they're embarrassed that their national dish's most important ingredients are not indigenous to the land they dish belongs to.
The truth, that it was introduced to Korea as a result of the Columbian Exchange, dares Korea to open up and accept foreign influences. There are many groups in Korea who can never accept such a thing.


All this decoration and display and not even a one liner about where garlic and chili came from

In A Folk Tale:
The lie has even affected Korean folk tales. There is a story about the founder of Korea Tan Keun, who offered a bear and a tiger a deal. They would have to stay in a cave for 100 days eating nothing but herbs and garlic. The tiger didn't make it past 30 days, but the bear stayed the full 100 days and became a human woman and married the son of God and became the mother of all Koreans.
What's wrong with the picture here?
It's almost like the first guys who told the story or added garlic into the story, never realized that garlic was never native to Korea and the lie continued. Not only that, the so called fairy tale that is supposedly extremely ancient either isn't, or underwent some serious revision somewhere along the way.


Different kinds of Kimchi

It makes me question even more things: is the cabbage native to Korea?
And more importantly, why is it so important that something be "purely" Korean?
They claim that Kimchi contains more Lactic Acid Bacteria (which attacks the Helicobacter pylori) than Yoghurt, but no one has ever answered: how much Lactic Acid Bacteria is too much?

Koreans will tell you that their food and cuisine go back thousands of years, but considering how important gartlic and chili pepper is in their food and how recent their introduction was, you can pretty much discount most of that talk.

All this propaganda makes everything about the food unbelievable and in fact, suspect.