The Illustrated Guide to 100 Korean Snacks
100种韩国零食图鉴
한국과자도감 100
The Illustrated Guide to 100 Korean Snacks is a book that revisits familiar Korean snacks through the language of taste, preference, and memory.
From someone's all-time favorite to a snack another person has always felt unsure about, and from iconic classics to things casually picked up at a convenience store, the book gathers each snack's character, contrasting reactions, short essays, and small interesting facts into a single volume.
A small, affectionate guide that revisits familiar snacks through taste, preference, and memory.
Inside the Book
This book treats snacks as small cultural objects layered with personal taste and memory.
Each entry includes a snack introduction, a note from someone who loves it, a note from someone who finds it lacking, and an interesting fact.
Between chapters, short essays explore the memories and culture surrounding snacks.
It is designed to be opened like a dictionary, or read slowly like an archive of taste.
Sample spread from the book
Why snacks?
Snacks are foods we encounter almost as naturally as childhood itself. They move between permission and prohibition, and stay with us from early treats to adult habits.
That is why a particular time of life seems to live inside each snack. There are snacks everyone loves, snacks someone cannot stand, and snacks that feel oddly dear for no obvious reason. I found it fascinating that an entire stretch of a person's life could gather around something so small.
In front of the snack shelf, people somehow become equal. Everyone arrives with personal standards, attachments, and stories. That discovery is what made snacks the first subject of this series.
From 《In Praise of Snacks》 to 《The Illustrated Guide to 100 Korean Snacks》
The Illustrated Guide to 100 Korean Snacks grew out of *Gwaja Yechan* (In Praise of Snacks), an online series Yein Jung published on Brunch. BrunchStory is one of Korea's leading writing platforms; it surpassed 70,000 writers in April 2024, and the 12th Brunch Book Publishing Project drew 10,437 submissions. On Brunch, *Gwaja Yechan* became a place where memories and preferences around Korean snacks were gathered piece by piece.
The series was also featured on Brunch's main page several times.
About the Project
This project is an attempt to gather familiar and endearing subjects, one by one, in the form of an illustrated guide. Even things that seem light or ordinary can take on a very different density once people's tastes, words, and memories begin to collect around them.
One of the most rewarding moments in this process has been seeing readers recall and offer up stories of their own. Going forward, I hope the project will not stop at snacks alone, but expand to other small and approachable subjects from everyday life—ice cream, drinks, bread, and more—each carrying its own memories and tastes.
The project will not stop at books alone. I hope it can extend into snack parties built around favorite snacks, spin-off works that introduce Korean snacks to non-Korean audiences, and other formats that widen the conversations snacks can spark. And once the guide form has accumulated enough, I am excited to see what other shapes these stories might take.
Author
Yeye Jung
Yeye Jung is a writer and editor who documents familiar subjects from a fresh perspective.
Anything familiar carries private memories for the people who know it. Because such things are so close to us, their value can easily go unnoticed. But when they are gathered again in the form of a publication, people begin to bring out their own small, precious, and quietly affectionate stories.
There is a particular kind of happiness in that shared moment. To gently draw out feelings people have long known but rarely put into words, and to place them where they can be looked at together—that is one of the scenes Yeye Jung returns to when making publications.
Details
The Illustrated Guide to 100 Korean Snacks gathers impressions, comments, and memories of Korean snacks into a compact format.
The book is being shaped not only through text and image, but also through materiality, pacing, and the physical experience of holding and reading it.
Contact
The Illustrated Guide to 100 Korean Snacks is the starting point of a publishing practice that returns to familiar subjects and sees them again through books.
For art book fairs, exhibitions, collaborations, stockist inquiries, or other questions, please get in touch.