[Opinion] Meal

It was poet Kim Ji-ha who said that “food is the sky” in 1975. He cried out for “sharing food,” standing for people isolated by a monopolistic system, saying that, “As the sky cannot be monopolized, food can’t be owned by one, and as the stars in the sky cannot shine for a person solely, food should be shared by many.”

Poet Park No-hae, the symbol of labor movement in the 1980s, wrote that, “The means of living is the sky.” He also wrote that, “The boss is the sky on whom we three in this family depend totally in making a living, the doctor is the sky who can either heal or disable the hand that has been punched by the machine,” and dreamed of “a world where people are skies to one another.”

Life, when reduced to a word, is eating. When people say life is hard, it means that it’s difficult to make a living. When we Koreans were poor people, starving to death was commonplace. Poet Kim Yeong-seok has even written that rice reminds him of a tomb. ‘At the tomb on the mountain behind school/ was a bowl of white rice/ filled with the shape of the tomb like an alp./ It was the tomb/ of one who starved to death last year.”

No one should look down on food because it is the “base of humanity and thoughts,” says author Kim Hoon. “The change of the world does not mean that people can live without living, and the fact that high-end information and computers lead the times do not mean that everybody is free from having to produce three meals out of the field whether it rains or shines,” says Park No-hae. Though there are things holier and more substantial in the world, none of them can be achieved without food.

In the presidential election in 1956, there was a slogan that said, “Life’s too hungry, Let’s do something.” It was when per capita income was $400. After 50 years, when per capita income reached $20,000, the minds of the people who elected the opposition party candidate with an overwhelming gap, saying, “Life’s too hungry, Let’s do something” passed judgment on the fact that the “good words” of progressivism, distribution, independence, and equality, ended up as “the evil” that imperiled the people’s means of making a living. In the end, what matters is food (the economy). “Food is the sky (minds of the people) and the spirit of the times. What is dirty is not rice but words,” said Jesus. Will politics for food, not for words, begin?

Editorial Writer Heo Mun-myeong, angelhuh@donga.com