In this articIe I discuss and analyze how South Korean manufacturers of rice cakes (ttôk) relate to bread (ppang) and bakeries in their discourses and practices. For them, bread and bakeries are a competing merchandise, a concept of progress and modernity, and a relatable branch of foodstuff manufacturing in which individual skill (gisul) is applied.

Rice and wheat as staple grains, food ingredients, and representatives of culinary traditions are commonly compared and contrasted in South Korean discourses on food. Rice, despite its continuously declining consumption, continues to be considered the mainstay of Koreans’ diet and their staple food (jusik), while the use wheat especially when baked to bread is regarded as the epitome of the perceived Westernization of Korean foodways.

This phenomenon was especially discernible among rice cake makers and elected and salaried functionaries active in the sector’s organization, among whom I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork for a study on trade associations as Korean culture of economy. Bread and bakeries appeared in their discussions as well as in conversations with me, referring to the skills of the practitioners, the developed state of the bakery sector and its state-sanctioned qualification license while also noticing the generally poor fate of “alley business” bakeries in competition against more auspiciously located corporate chain stores.

While my interlocutors usually did not refer to bread as “foreign” food, it functioned for them as a contrast to the traditionality of rice cake, especially for its “non-Korean” ingredient wheat, which is almost totally imported, whereas rice is one of the very few basic foods in which South Korea is practically self-sufficient.

Rice cakes are undeniably “traditional” in the sense that grinding, steaming, and pounding rice to make ttôk is an ancient method of processing rice and that ttôk are largely consumed in contexts deemed as traditional, but as a specialized profession rice cake manufacturing is a rather recent phenomenon. Bread in Korea has always been an industrial and a commercial product, while rice cakes were commonly made at home for ritual and celebratory as well as occasional everyday consumption well into 1980s.

My rice cake maker interlocutors thus relate their own product and profession to bread and bakeries in a situation in which the commonness of consumption of bread is widely considered, often in a somewhat regretting manner, as Westernization of the Korean diet. While this strengthens rice cake makers’ own sense of being attached to and carriers of Korean tradition, in terms of contemporary small-scale businesskeeping as well as South Korean capitalism, bread and bakeries are an example and a benchmark of modernity.

By relating to bread and baking, rice cake makers make sense of their livelihood and product as well as societal and cultural chances that have affected it. For them, bread and bread-making are objects of narration to which experiences, hopes, and anxieties are projected.