In the English language, “enough” presents some interesting problems. It doesn’t sound the way it’s spelled, and it’s difficult to explain. The dictionary defines it as an adverb meaning “so as to be adequate or sufficient; as much as necessary.” In other words: when used to describe quality, enough is a matter of opinion; as a quantity, it is a matter of fact. Goldilocks did not want to eat the baby bear’s porridge because she deemed it not warm enough, and she could not sit in the baby bear’s chair because it was not big enough.

The children I taught in Korea understood this complex concept more easily than I expected. After all, when you are a child, your life is defined by the gap between expectations and experience, desire and ability. You want to ride the rollercoaster but you are not tall enough. You want to have ten cookies but there are not enough. You want to play but your parents believe that you have not worked hard enough on your chores. We all learn early on that the pursuit of the elusive enough, and the equally important avoidance of too much and not enough, is what drives everything we do. And everyone has their own personal definition of what that means.

When I began to write about food, there was no such thing as too much. Too much food writing to do? I’m just lucky to be living the dream. Too much free cheese? Please. Too much wine? Unthinkable. Too much healthy, organic, vegetarian whatever? How is that possible?

As it turned out, it was possible. The people who populate the food world are, almost as a rule, generous, kind, forgiving, uninhibited, fun, creative nurturers. But they can also be martyrous, amoral, self-serving, undisciplined alcoholics who rarely know when enough is enough. Keeping up and keeping company with them, I gained weight and burned out.

This motivated me to move to Asia, where definitions of enough differ dramatically from those in America. In Seoul, people live in smaller houses, import less foreign or non-seasonal ingredients, and eat less in general. By embracing their definition of enough, I felt healthier immediately.

Slicing up fresh chamwae melon to share with my neighbor, Kate

I still defined myself as a food writer, however, and began to reassess how my work would change in this new world. What I now had in abundance was curiosity and new foods to try, yet I had less time, resources or information about that food. This gap presented a few issues:

1) I did not want to write about food without having enough information about it. Being a journalist, my standards for enough information are high. I had to learn the language, make the necessary contacts, do the historical and nutritional research, and try out recipes in my own kitchen before I felt I knew enough about Korean food to write about it.

2) I did not want to write about food unless my writing was useful enough. The Interwebs are lousy with people making Momofuku recipes to the letter and posting snapshots of the results with their thousand-dollar SLRs. This is their prerogative, of course, but I did not want to add to this noise, to brag or to keep a public diary of my eating — I wanted to make actionable art that could help and inspire people. Which, again, in my mind, depended largely on the first condition of having enough accurate information to share.

These two conditions took a long time to fulfill. But, I needed to keep writing, and eating. So, in the fall of my year in Korea, I did some food-based translating work for the Blue House (the President’s residence here in Korea) and taught a few cooking classes. In the winter, I co-hosted a 25-person Thanksgiving party called WARMTH, and drew on my experience with Wine Riot to help to plan and pull off an event called Fermentation Celebration, which brought together a dozen creative vendors and over 300 hungry people to sample homemade beer, kimchi, rice wine, kefir and other treats. In the spring, I helped to plant two small gardens with friends, and raised a few plants of my own with my adopted Korean grandmother.

Garden party: image courtesy of Jessica Perlaza

And just a few months ago, as my confidence and comfort in Korea grew, I began to write about food again, and to respond to invitations from publications there to submit my work. First, I created a mixed-media piece of artwork for a literary journal called Obstructure.  Then, I wrote a long feature about Korean rice wine for Groove, Seoul’s main English-language glossy.

Then, I decided to create my own useful, informative project: I felt Korea needed an English-language pocket food guide for cooks like me, as I had found nothing of the sort in all my travels. So I put a team of talented illustrators and designers together, researched and wrote the history and current conditions of Korea’s food industry, and made about 60 copies of the book, bound with handmade covers created by my friends. I gave them to Korean friends, to American food writers, and to my students (who fact-checked them for me). Nearly every person in my in yeon has touched this project, or will do so in the future. And by their definitions and mine, this project was both informative and useful enough to justify improving it and building on it in the future. (The ongoing news about that project, called What Is It?, lives here on Tumblr.)

Binding books near Noksapyeong

The irony is that now that I’ve left Korea (yes, sad but true), I finally feel like I have enough to say about it. Too much, now, actually: I have a backlog of photos and stories to tell, about all of the above and more, and not enough time to tell them. But over the next few months, I’m going to try. 

The story of my food writing this year has one other interesting epilogue, at least for me. As I poured my energy into making art and connecting with my loved ones near and far, a strange thing happened: I started eating less. Much less. I’ve lost weight, stopped eating at restaurants (fancy or otherwise) and drinking fancy booze except for on very special occasions, and decreased the food I buy and eat on impulse alone. In general, I spend my nights cooking simple food for friends and my days doing other things. Once it became clear to me that the world is full of enough food and love to go around — provided we don’t take more than our fair share — I did not need to have it all anymore.

I just needed to have enough.

Just-warm-enough sticky rice porridge (rocky road and apple pie flavors), made on behalf of Obstructure (recipe here)