Astute readers will pick up on the use of the indefinite article in my title. There were many, of course, and some were far more serious than the one I will discuss here. Before I proceed to that, though, I would like to share a little personal information with you.
As some of you have inferred from reading previous entries, I am a certified carnivore. I cannot conceive of a world without meat. Though beef is not my favorite—pork is—it is a solid number two. There are excellent steakhouses in Tokyo and plenty of Korean restaurants serving up what I like, yakiniku style. When at the former, I drink wine with my meal. At the latter, I drink what many consider—myself included—Korea’s national drink, makgeolli,…until that fateful night in 2025 when I discovered that the brand that I had heretofore been ordering—a major one—contains aspartame! I have always avoided anything containing artificial sweeteners, high fructose corn syrup, or items labeled “Diet” or “Low Fat.” I am also in the habit of checking the ingredients on products with which I am not familiar in order to be sure that such things are not within. When it comes to traditional fare, I am less vigilant, though. Call me “naïve.” The practice of using aspartame dates back, at least in the Republic of Korea, to the days of Park Chung Hee (1917-1979). Park, you see, had a thing for food.
The politics of food became a symbol of Park Chung-hee’s coercive tactics. Among his controversial social policies was one that aimed to change the eating habits of Koreans: efforts to replace rice consumption with wheat-based diets. …the majority of brewers started substituting wheat powder for rice…. The regime further imposed a series of draconian laws, designating days when markets could not sell any rice…. Given such restrictions, brewers resorted to using artificial sweetening additives such as saccharin and aspartame…to speed up the fermentation process.1
Shocking, indeed, but there is no need to despair. There are producers marketing additive-free makgeolli. I will discuss one of them in the next entry.
1Karras, A., Mitchell, L. (eds.), Encounters Old and New in World History: Essays Inspired by Jerry H. Bentley, “Shaken or Stirred? Recreating Makgeolli for the Twenty-First Century” (University of Hawaii Press, 2017).
Drinking Japan 