Instant Noodle Recycling Art

I am living in Vancouver, Canada as a first generation immigrant woman in my 40s from South Korea. I have never married and I am single, living with two cats in a shared house with three to seven different people in this house (depending on room occupancies of this rental house) All of my past and current roommates are not Korean but mostly Canadian born and raised citizens or immigrants from other countries. When I first moved into this shared house two years ago, I moved my living city from Toronto to Vancouver with two of my cats. In Toronto, the big metropolitan city that most people don't seem to care much of consuming synthetic chemicals and processed food, and I also wasn't very self conscious about my ethnic food consumption in that urban environment. However, after I moved to this house where my roommates at that time were in a quite strictly health conscious and environmentally friendly food consumption lifestyle, I often felt cringed and ashamed of my eating Korean processed food like instant noodle. Whenever I could sense a disdained look or funny comment on my meal choices or grocery shopping items from my roommates, I felt often torn.

In hindsight, I didn't have to be self conscious about what I like to eat at home yet I realized that the sense of shame in my ethnic food consumption is one of those internalized cultural exclusion or even systematic racism against my own cultural background. There are many other processed mainstream food such as chips or frozen pizza etc in popular grocery stores in Canada and they are also unhealthy, full of chemicals, wrapped in plastics, but those are much more socially acceptable and tolerable than minority ethnic food product like Korean instant noodle. The food that I am familiar with as an ethical minority in this country is often unfamiliar with the majority of people who don't have any connection or cultural exposure to certain minority ethnic group subculture like mine as Korean. The unfamiliarity of food often becomes ostracized or disowned cultural value of minority group in mainstream culture and people’s reactions towards my own food choices as a minority simply reflect those marginalized cultural values.

Over the past two years, I have come to realize that food is one of the most representative values of a person’s social and cultural identity. Literally our bodies are made of what we eat and our memories to eat and to feel familiar with certain food often determine our cultural and ethnical identities. Korean people recognize certain Korean dishes and identify brand names of food products with their own memories of eating those brand products while they were growing up. And they can find those “Korean insider brands” mostly in Korean grocery stores where often they can randomly meet Korean speaking folks in common. As a people of colour minority group immigrant, that kind of cultural bond through food is the moment where my own culturally invisible identities become visible and prominently validated. So seeing my Korean food consumption as “bad choice” makes my cultural identity invalid and whenever I buy into that subconscious invalidation on my ethnic food consumption, it hurts my feelings pretty badly yet I couldn’t communicate it with anyone else other than a few Korean speaking diaspora friends.

Other than the feeling level associated with cultural identity pride, eating Korean processed food like instant noodle is physically not good for my body, especially because I have lived through inflammatory autoimmune bowel disease, Ulcerative Colitis for 14 years. However, the emotional hunger to validate my own cultural identity as Korean is greater than physical need, and I found myself very attached to my memories associated with eating those instant noodles when I was growing up in a working class family in South Korea 30 and 40 something years ago. I tried not to buy and eat those Korean instant noodle but, whenever everyday life stress goes up and I feel isolated and emotionally hungry, my craving for those instant noodles soars up. So they become one of my biggest guilty pleasures.

After the 1st lock down of Pandemic started last year, I stocked up a lot of instant noodle and ate quite a few staying at home, craving a sense of belonging and comfort while I was even more isolated in this shared house that is full of people who don’t seem to be interested in understanding who I am and where I am from. I could just boil hot water and eat instant cup noodle in my own room instead of bothered by sharing kitchen and socializing in that shared cooking area. All of my local friends social circles are closed off after lock down, staying in their own home policy and strictly complying with the COVID-19 social distancing policies and law enforcement. Due to those unhealthy instant noodle dishes consumption and sense of isolation, my gut health got really poor and I often had to suffer from those inflammatory responses of poor gut health but I couldn't cope my emotional and psychological hunger in better ways than eating those noodles.

When the gun shooting and violent actions against Asian people started surfacing in this March, I was eating those noodles almost every day, and the inflammation in my gut got quite unwell. I had to stop eating those noodles and force myself to undergo intense cleansing diet treatment in order to detoxify my body from unhealthy eating habit. All those times, I was feeling very guilty to eat unhealthy food, sourcing the sense of comfort and cultural validation with a means to attack my own bodily health as well as environmental wellness. I wanted to do something positive about that sense of guilt and shame, so I decided to collect the plastic wraps of instant noodle or other Korean grocery product packages.

Having been collecting those Korean grocery food wraps for several months, I’m envisioning mimicking Andy Warhol’s pop art, using those Korean instant noodle wraps written in English, French, Korean, and Chinese characters. When I cut those food wraps in various colours and shapes in different language, I’m finding a joy to re-appropriating my diaspora identities to be see in much more self empowering way. I edit those labels names into creative slogans to empower my own minority identities or to promote environmental sustainability values and those affirmative wordings and images can make new label art work as a recycling mosaic art label work series of my own. Also, I am imagining to make those transparent plastic vinyl wraps quilted to become a small greenhouse cover for my gardening work during winter time. It could be a fun creative experimental gardening work with food wrap recycling materials. It is still more in seeding process of this recycling art project but just seeing how much I have collected those wraps and cutting those wraps just for fun alone open a gateway in my mind to see my own guilt ridden nostalgic food consumption into positive change of new creation. And this is where my guilty pleasure has transformed to be a creative happy project that I am holding in my hand right now.