+
upworthy

A Korean festival just made 60 tons of free kimchi for those who need it.

How much do you love kimchi?

Probably not as much as this woman. All photos by Woohae Cho/Getty Images.

If you grew up eating Korean food or have been to any fusion restaurant or food truck in the last couple years, you're probably already familiar with the delicious, spicy goodness that is kimchi.


On Friday, Nov. 3, people donned red smocks and pinked gloves and dove into the age-old art of making the delicious dish as part of the Seoul Kimchi Festival.

The first day's attendance topped more than 2,300 people, who together produced a whopping 120,000 pounds of kimchi.

That's a lot of kimchi!

The festival started in 2014, and besides giving people a chance to get their hands dirty, it features parties, playgrounds, a kimchi museum, and plenty of opportunities to chow down on the stuff.

If you're not hungry already...

...I guarantee you will be now.

The festival gives Koreans a chance to get their hands dirty and reconnect with some age-old traditions.

You seriously don't understand. I'm writing this during lunchtime.

In the past, making kimchi was a big community event, done after the harvest and just before the first winter snowfall to make sure everyone had enough to eat through the winter. But as people have moved out of the country and into cities, this community tradition had fallen away. The modern festival was started to help people reconnect.

"We don’t really get much chance to make kimchi usually, so through this opportunity, I have come to understand how much effort our mothers and grandmothers put into making kimchi," Jeung Ji-hun, an 18-year-old student, told Reuters.

There's a Korean place, like, two blocks away. As soon as I send this to my editor.

To make kimchi, Napa cabbage leaves are salted and then slathered with a spicy paste made from garlic, ginger, seafood, and chili flakes. It can be eaten right away or left to ferment for a few days. Either way, the end result is a crunchy, spicy punch of savory umami flavors.

Yeah, that's approximately how much I'm going to need.

How else are you going to know it's good if you don't take a little taste?

That's just one recipe, though. Koreans have been chowing down on various recipes for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. It's even been recognized as an important cultural heritage by the United Nations.

Kimchi selfie!

Fitting for that traditional community spirit, the kimchi made at the festival will be packed up and given to needy households throughout Seoul.

Organizers are hoping to end up sharing a total of 120 tons over the course of the three-day event.

"This kimchi, along with our warm hearts, will be shared with our neighbors in need of help," festival director Shin Myung-ki told Reuters.

OK, lunchtime!

A pitbull stares at the window, looking for the mailman.


Dogs are naturally driven by a sense of purpose and a need for belonging, which are all part of their instinctual pack behavior. When a dog has a job to do, it taps into its needs for structure, purpose, and the feeling of contributing to its pack, which in a domestic setting translates to its human family.

But let’s be honest: In a traditional domestic setting, dogs have fewer chores they can do as they would on a farm or as part of a rescue unit. A doggy mom in Vancouver Island, Canada had fun with her dog’s purposeful uselessness by sharing the 5 “chores” her pitbull-Lab mix does around the house.

Keep ReadingShow less
Representative Image from Canva

Let's not curse any more children with bad names, shall we?

Some parents have no trouble giving their children perfectly unique, very meaningful names that won’t go on to ruin their adulthood. But others…well…they get an A for effort, but might want to consider hiring a baby name professional.

Things of course get even more complicated when one parent becomes attached to a name that they’re partner finds completely off-putting. It almost always leads to a squabble, because the more one parent is against the name, the more the other parent will go to bat for it.

This seemed to be the case for one soon-to-be mom on the Reddit AITA forum recently. Apparently, she was second-guessing her vehement reaction to her husband’s, ahem, avant garde baby name for their daughter, which she called “the worst name ever.”

But honestly, when you hear this name, I think you’ll agree she was totally in the right.

Keep ReadingShow less

An English doctor named Edward Jenner took incredible risks to try to rid his world of smallpox. Because of his efforts and the efforts of scientists like him, the only thing between deadly diseases like the ones below and extinction are people who refuse to vaccinate their kids. Don't be that parent.

Unfortunately, because of the misinformation from the anti-vaccination movement, some of these diseases have trended up in a really bad way over the past several years.

Keep ReadingShow less

A beautiful cruise ship crossing the seas.

Going on a cruise can be an incredible getaway from the stresses of life on the mainland. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t an element of danger when living on a ship 200-plus feet high, traveling up to 35 miles per hour and subject to the whims of the sea.

An average of about 19 people go overboard every year, and only around 28% survive. Cruise ship lawyer Spencer Aronfeld explained the phenomenon in a viral TikTok video, in which he also revealed the secret code the crew uses when tragedy happens.

Keep ReadingShow less
Joy

Kudos to the heroes who had 90 seconds to save lives in the Key Bridge collapse

The loss of 6 lives is tragic, but the dispatch recording shows it could have been so much worse.

Representative image by Gustavo Fring/Pexels

The workers who responded to the Dali's mayday call saved lives with their quick response.

As more details of the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore emerge, it's becoming more apparent how much worse this catastrophe could have been.

Just minutes before 1:30am on March 26, shortly after leaving port in Baltimore Harbor, a cargo ship named Dali lost power and control of its steering, sending it careening into a structural pillar on Key Bridge. The crew of the Dali issued a mayday call at 1:26am to alert authorities of the power failure, giving responders crucial moments to prepare for a potential collision. Just 90 seconds later, the ship hit a pylon, triggering a total collapse of the 1.6-mile bridge into the Patapsco River.

Dispatch audio of those moments shows the calm professionalism and quick actions that limited the loss of life in an unexpected situation where every second counted.

Keep ReadingShow less
Joy

Yale's pep band had to miss the NCAA tournament. University of Idaho said, 'We got you.'

In an act of true sportsmanship, the Vandal band learned Yale's fight song, wore their gear and cheered them on.

Courtesy of University of Idaho

The Idaho Vandals answered the call when Yale needed a pep band.

Yale University and the University of Idaho could not be more different. Ivy League vs. state school. East Coast vs. Pacific Northwest. City vs. farm town. But in the first two rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament, extenuating circumstances brought them together as one, with the Bulldogs and the Vandals becoming the "Vandogs" for a weekend.

When Yale made it to the March Madness tournament, members of the school's pep band had already committed to other travel plans during spring break. They couldn't gather enough members to make the trek across the country to Spokane, Washington, so the Yale Bulldogs were left without their fight song unless other arrangements could be made.

When University of Idaho athletic band director Spencer Martin got wind of the need less than a week before Yale's game against Auburn, he sent out a message to his band members asking if anyone would be interested in stepping in. The response was a wave of immediate yeses, so Martin got to work arranging instruments and the students dedicated themselves to learning Yale's fight song and other traditional Yale pep songs.

Keep ReadingShow less