Modern Food Culture Trends: What Does Your Dining Table Look Like?

Attempts to Rewrite ‘My Own Food Story’ Within a Massive System

• Explore the new face of home cooking (Home-cook) changed after the pandemic.
• Analyze personalization and SNS trends behind the mala soup and tanghulu craze.
• Understand the changing meaning of meals through the contrasting phenomena of solo dining and mukbang.

Today, our food culture is more diverse and complex than ever. Starting the day with homemade sourdough, enjoying mala soup with ingredients chosen to taste at lunch, and having a special dinner with Michelin restaurant ready meals (RMR) is no longer unusual. This article explores how we eat amid these vast changes and the new stories emerging.

1. Rediscovering the Kitchen: The New Faces of Home Cooking

Beyond the outdated narrative of declining cooking skills, ‘home meals’ today are redefined as spaces of creativity, healing, and evolving social roles.

Pandemic Kitchen: A Sanctuary of Control and Creation

The global home cooking boom during the COVID-19 pandemic was more than a trend. In extreme uncertainty, it provided individuals with one of the few senses of control and visible achievement through meaningful rituals.

The ‘Dalgona coffee’ challenge, requiring over 400 stirs, was a shared performance, while sourdough baking—with its living ‘starter’—expressed a deep psychological desire for resilience and comfort.

Democratization of Recipes and Evolving Home Scenes

The ‘Baek Jong-won Syndrome’ transformed expert-centered cooking culture into an everyday activity accessible to all, dramatically lowering barriers to cooking.

At the same time, the rise of ‘Men Cooking at Home’ shows kitchens are no longer bound by traditional gender roles. Using technologies like air fryers and meal kits, cooking is embraced as a routine household chore. This shift indicates cooking knowledge is moving from tacit knowledge inherited from mothers to explicit knowledge learned via apps and subscription services.

2. My Own Bowl: Personalized Food Culture and Global Tastes

Especially among the MZ generation, food has become a key medium for self-expression and identity formation.

Mala Soup Phenomenon: My Spices, My Story

The explosive popularity of mala soup vividly demonstrates the power of ‘customization.’ The DIY experience of selecting ingredients and spice levels perfectly matches the generation’s desire for control and self-expression, offering the joy of creating a unique menu through endless combinations.

SNS Food Cycle: From Tanghulu to Rose Tteokbokki

Social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram are the most powerful engines shaping modern food trends. They create fast, intense trend cycles based on visual and auditory stimuli rather than taste, transforming ’eating’ into ‘showing eating.’

3. Alone, Yet Together: Redefining the Meaning of Meals

Modern dining scenes embody the paradox of intentional solo dining for self-care and virtual communities formed through ‘mukbang’ to alleviate loneliness.

The Joy of Eating Alone: Rediscovering ‘Solo Dining’

I also cherish my solo meal times. The freedom to focus solely on the food, free from social obligations, can be the best reward in a busy life. Like the monologue in the Japanese drama “Solitary Gourmet,” “Eating without disturbance from anyone is a rewarding act”—perhaps the greatest healing granted equally to modern people.

This philosophy is architecturally realized in spaces like Ichiran Ramen’s ‘flavor concentration counters,’ which resemble study cubicles.

Virtual Dinner Table: The Paradox of ‘Mukbang’

‘Mukbang’ serves as a virtual community easing the loneliness of solo diners but has sometimes degenerated into shocking spectacles with excessive food and extreme menus due to intensified competition. This can cause overeating and reduce satisfaction with normal meals, raising health concerns.

4. Banquet of Convenience: Navigating the Industrialized Dining Table

Today’s convenient food culture is delivered through sophisticated systems but hides invisible costs and complexities.

HMR-RMR Spectrum: The Modern Compromise

The evolution from simple HMR (Home Meal Replacement) to premium RMR (Restaurant Meal Replacement) reflects consumers’ desire for convenience, quality, and special experiences simultaneously. The rise of RMR products, which commercialize famous restaurant menus as meal kits, is a win-win strategy allowing people to enjoy verified high-quality food at home.

Delivery Dilemma: The Cost of Convenience

Delivery apps have reshaped the dining industry, but high fees lead to consumer dissatisfaction and burdens on small business owners. Yet, our reliance on delivery and ready meals is not just about saving time.

This aligns with the psychological concept of ‘decision fatigue.’ The long decision-making process starting from ‘what to eat’ is essentially outsourcing mental labor. Despite the high cost, these services are addictive because they offer the powerful value of liberation from the cognitive burden of ‘feeding oneself.’

Conclusion

The complex trends in modern food culture can be summarized as a desire to find a better balance among control, convenience, individuality, and community.

• Rise of Personalization: Through foods like mala soup reflecting personal tastes, we reclaim control over meals.
• Redefinition of Space: The pandemic turned kitchens into spaces of creation and refuge, while mukbang formed virtual dining communities.
• Evolution of Convenience: Ready meals and delivery apps evolved beyond time-saving to services that reduce mental decision burdens.

Alongside the grand narratives written by the global food industry, millions of small, personal stories are being written in our kitchens and at our tables. What new story will you write with your next meal?