The Internet has already become a powerful tool for the proliferation of ethnic food. Countless websites provide all kinds of information about the traditional dishes within a cuisine, including everything from their origins to their methods of preparation.  In addition to spreading awareness and knowledge of various ethnic foods, many websites offer recipes so that cooks can prepare a wide variety of world cuisines right in their own homes. Some websites, such as allrecipes.com, allow users from anywhere in the world to share their recipes, rate those of others, offer tips and advice to their fellow cooks, as well as post pictures of their finished products. Other websites, such as foodnetwork.com, even provide users with online videos demonstrating techniques and cooking methods.

As portable devices with Internet access become increasingly popular and ubiquitous, applications such as Local Eats and Urban Spoon for the iPhone allow people to easily locate nearby restaurants according to cuisine, distance, price, and ranking.  A similar function exists for GPS systems in cars, providing drivers with the location and contact information of surrounding eateries often by cuisine.  The spread of such applications emphasizes that more and more people are broadening their diets to include a wide variety of ethnic food when dining out.

In the future, ethnic food will only become more widespread and popular with the help of the World Wide Web.  More and more restaurants will allow diners to conveniently place orders, especially take-out, online.  Portable devices like the iPhone and GPS systems will help expand people’s dining options as they inform hungry users of the prices, reviews, and even nutrition information of the various items offered on the menus of nearby restaurants.  Global websites that provide recipes will expand to include and connect a more diverse audience as home cooks from all over the world turn to the ease and convenience of online recipe boxes.

But despite the current boom and bright future of the Internet within the realm of ethnic food, certain cuisines remain much less accessible to home cooks than others.  As a second-generation Korean American, I have had difficulty finding user-friendly recipes for traditional Korean dishes.  Websites like allrecipes.com provide only a meager collection of Korean recipes, while Korean cookbooks use inconvenient metric measurements or ambiguous ones, such as “a handful” or “a dash.”

For my project, I plan to help remedy this problem by creating a website that offers much more than just traditional Korean recipes with ingredients listed in convenient units.  I hope to create a step-by-step recipe guide with pictures to help those cooks who are approaching Korean cooking for the first time.  In addition, my website will include background information and descriptions of the many dishes within Korean cooking besides the most famous ones so that users may gain an appreciation for the sheer diversity within Korean cuisine.  Also, I hope to interview several relatives about their memories of Korean food to depict the importance of food to every aspect of Korean culture as its cuisine takes center stage in nearly every occasion and celebration.  Through this website, I hope to not only convey my own passion for my heritage and its culinary traditions but also share the incredible world of Korean cooking with others.

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