Bread at Every Meal vs. Kimchi at Every Meal: Two Nations That Have Figured Out Breakfast and Will Not Be Taking Feedback

🇩🇪 Germany · 🇰🇷 South Korea

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

Germany and South Korea share a reputation for taking food seriously, and a demographic history of scarcity that shaped current eating culture in ways both countries are simultaneously proud of and actively moving past. The similarities end there. One has built its food identity around a fermented cabbage dish that functions as condiment, side dish, national symbol, and probiotic — and appears at every meal including breakfast. The other has built its identity around bread, considers a proper rye loaf a genuine object of cultural patrimony, and treats the cold dinner as not merely acceptable but philosophically correct. Both are right. Neither fully understands the other.

Do's & Don'ts

🇩🇪 Germany

🇰🇷 South Korea

Germany

German food culture is characterised by structure, regional pride, and an honest relationship with meat and starch that no amount of wellness industry pressure has fundamentally altered. The three daily meals maintain their basic architecture across generations: a typically light breakfast (Frühstück) of bread, cold cuts, and cheese; a hot lunch (Mittagessen) that remains the main meal of the day in many traditional and family contexts; and a cold dinner (Abendbrot — literally "evening bread") that is often, again, bread with accompaniments. The hot dinner that defines meal culture in much of the rest of Europe is, in Germany, more a concession to urban working schedules than a cultural norm.

German bread culture deserves separate consideration. Germany has approximately 3,000 registered types of bread — a figure that sounds like nationalist hyperbole until you walk into any German bakery and confront the actual taxonomy of rye, wheat, spelt, and mixed-grain loaves arranged by region, density, and intended social occasion. UNESCO added German bread culture to its Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2015, a recognition that Germans received with the careful combination of satisfaction and understatement that is their default register for praise. The Local's coverage of expat food adaptation consistently identifies bread as the habit foreigners take longest to understand and quickest to miss after leaving.

Eating habits in Germany have evolved substantially with urbanisation and internationalisation. Döner kebab, introduced by Turkish migrant workers in the 1970s, has become so thoroughly integrated into street food culture that it is considered essentially local. Italian, Vietnamese, Thai, and Japanese cuisine are mainstream in German cities. The Mittagstisch — the daily lunch menu offered by restaurants and canteens at reduced prices — remains a fixture of office culture, with many German workers treating a proper hot lunch as non-negotiable. Drinking culture is inseparable from food culture: beer accompanies most informal meals, and regional varieties are points of local identity that Germans defend with a conviction suggesting the arguments have been running for centuries, because they have.

South Korea

South Korean eating culture is organised around rice, community, and a side-dish ecology of remarkable complexity. The baseline Korean meal consists of plain boiled rice (bap), soup (guk or jjigae), kimchi, and three to five additional side dishes (banchan) — a system that treats every meal as a social occasion requiring distribution, sharing, and the implicit understanding that leaving a dish unfinished is acceptable but leaving the rice bowl is not. First-time Western visitors report the shared-plate system as either deeply welcoming or slightly alarming, depending on their relationship with food boundaries.

Eating together carries professional weight in Korean culture that extends well beyond the pleasure of the meal. The hoesik — the mandatory social dining and drinking outing with coworkers — has been a defining feature of Korean corporate life for decades. These gatherings typically involve multiple rounds at different establishments: the first for food, subsequent ones for drinks, in a structure that functions as loyalty demonstration and relationship-building event with attendance pressure that is not entirely voluntary. The hoesik is declining in frequency, particularly among younger workers who have less patience for mandatory conviviality at 11pm on a Tuesday, but its underlying logic — that eating together creates bonds that working together does not — remains culturally active.

Korean eating patterns have shifted substantially in the past two decades. Statista data shows increasing ultra-processed food consumption, declining breakfast rates among millennials and Gen Z, and an explosion of delivery app usage that has made midnight tteokbokki a normalised urban behaviour. Skipping meals, previously a mark of circumstance, has become common among young professionals navigating demanding work schedules and beauty-standard pressures. None of this has dislodged the communal table as the primary site of relationship maintenance — it has simply moved some of those relationships to a delivery app at midnight.

The Reckoning

The contrast between German and Korean food culture maps onto a broader difference in what meals are supposed to accomplish. German meal culture has become increasingly private and individual: Abendbrot eaten at home, dinner in restaurants a deliberate social occasion rather than a default. Korean meal culture, even as hoesik declines and delivery apps atomise eating, retains a residual communal logic that the table is not merely where food happens but where relationships are built and periodically maintained.

One expat who had worked in both Frankfurt and Seoul put it this way in a forum post: "In Germany, my colleagues and I worked together for eight months before we had a proper meal together. In Seoul, we were eating together by the second week. By the fourth week we were eating together at midnight and I had developed strong opinions about which fried chicken chain was best." The German colleagues were not unfriendly. The Korean colleagues were not intrusive. Both sets had simply built their relationship logic into the meal.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

The Local DE — "In Germany, it is customary to bring snacks to work for everyone on your birthday. Usually chocolate, pralines or cookies. If you're a great and generous person, you will even bring homemade cake. I have no idea how this originated. All I know is that it is another occasion to eat cake, and that's fine by me."

Quora — "German food is very strange for Koreans. They eat bread in the morning and evening, but only one warm meal at noon. Germans don't eat soup as a side dish, don't eat spicy hot things, and don't eat kimchi. Additionally, Germans eat more meat and less vegetables." — Korean expat in Germany comparing adjustments

Quora — "Why is food such a big deal in Korean culture? One of the first signs that a Korean cares about you is that they try to feed you or encourage you to eat." — expat reflecting on how food functions as social language in Korea

Korea.net (Internations-adjacent expat feature) — "Korean hoesik can be overwhelming for those unaccustomed to spending time with coworkers outside the office, but as I discovered, this warm tradition sheds insight on Korean culture and offers the opportunity for friendship and bonding that the office itself rarely provides."

r/germany — "After six months in Munich I started having bread for dinner and genuinely not minding it. I now understand that Abendbrot is not a meal you tolerate. It is a meal that tolerates you, until you come around."

Conclusion

Every culture's food tells you what that culture values when it is not performing for anyone. Germany values craftsmanship, regional specificity, and the restorative logic of a proper lunch that punctuates the working day rather than being squeezed into it. South Korea values communal participation, flavour complexity, and the social utility of a table that nobody leaves until the relationship has been adequately maintained — or until the third establishment of the evening has run out of things to order.

Both are legitimate food philosophies. Both produce, as a side effect, some of the most rewarding dining available on the planet. The expat who has lived in both countries tends to emerge with a profound appreciation for rye bread and a mild ongoing anxiety about whether the people at the table are eating enough, which turns out to be a very German and a very Korean concern simultaneously.