LOKA | Production 001 | Seoul, South Korea
Korea Food Trip
Host
About the trip
Some knowledge only lives in hands. A Korean-Canadian chef returns to Seoul to find what his parents' cuisine remembered - before the last people who know it are gone.
Korea modernised faster than almost any nation on earth. In a generation it became one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world. TK grew up between two versions of it — the Korea his parents carried out and the Korea that kept moving without them. This trip moves through Seoul with him, through the kitchens, markets, and fermentation cellars that most visitors never find, eating the evidence of what survived.
The gap between the Korea that was carried away and the Korea that stayed. The knowledge that lives in an older generation's hands and the younger generation deciding what to do with it. The question of what gets passed down, what gets reinvented, and what disappears in the translation between a grandmother's kitchen and a Michelin-starred restaurant two kilometres away.
Beneath Seoul's surface of technology and modernity exists a parallel city of fermentation masters, market vendors who have been making the same thing the same way for forty years, and grandmothers whose recipes were never written down because they never needed to be. This is the subculture of Korean food memory — the people who carry the knowledge in their hands rather than their heads. TK has spent thirty years earning access to this world. Most travelers pass through Seoul without knowing it exists. This trip goes inside it.
Every Loka production generates media. A documentary of what happened. Essays from inside the journey. Photography. The story of this trip will outlast the trip itself. As a traveler you are part of that production. Your experience becomes part of the record.
Dates
1st - 12th September 2026
Price
$5000
Duration
30 days
Group size
What's included in the price?
Accommodation, all meals relevant to the thesis, ground transport, and Loka production documentation
What's NOT included
Flights and transport to the meeting point