The thing was that I had arrived in Britain on the cusp of a culinary revolution. Cracks were appearing on the mighty edifice of British resistance to 'foreign' food, and culinary traditions from outside were starting to trickle in. In the meantime, British cuisine was slowly starting to be upgraded, reinvented and fused with the new influences. Chefs, restaurant reviewers and food critics were becoming celebrities. Cookbooks were becoming as numerous as books on gardening (that peculiar British obsession - which other country. airs gardening programmes on TV at peak times in the evening?). Many cookbooks started featuring food histories and cultural com-mentaries, and not just recipes. With these changes (and my foreign travel), I increasingly encountered cuisines I had known nothing of. I was fascinated. I started trying different foods. I read cookbooks in bookshops and bought quite a few of them. I read avidly the food reviews and features in newspapers. I was starting my own culinary revolution as well.

While my food universe was expanding at lightning speed, the other universe of mine - economics - was, sadly, being sucked into a black hole. Up to the 1970s, economics was populated by a diverse range of 'schools' containing different visions and research methodologies - Classical, Marxist, Neoclassical, Keynes-ian, Developmentalist, Austrian, Schumpeterian, Institutionalist and Behaviouralist, to name only the most significant.* Not only did they coexist but they interacted with each other. Sometimes they clashed in a 'death match' - the Austrians vs. the Marxists in the 1920s and the 1930s, or the Keynesians vs. the Neoclassicals in the 196os and the 1970s. At other times, the interactions were more benign. Through debates and policy experiments tried by different governments around the world, each school was forced to hone their arguments. Different schools borrowed ideas from each other (often without proper acknowledgement). Some economists even tried the fusion of different theories. Economics until the 1970s was, then, rather like the British food scene today: many different cuisines, each with different strengths and weaknesses, competing for attention; all of them proud of their traditions but obliged to learn from each other; with lots of deliberate and unintentional fusion happening.

My nation, Korea, was literally founded on garlic - and it shows. Check out our diet: Korean Fried Chicken* is a veritable festival of garlic: made with batter studded with chopped garlic, often then slathered in sweet, fiery chilli sauce, plus yet more garlic. Some Koreans find the amount of chopped garlic in the marinade for bul gogt (literally meaning fire meat) - thinly sliced flame-grilled beet - insufficient. Their solution? Eat it with raw garlic cloves or grilled slices of garlic. A very popular pickle, manul chang-achi, consists of heads of garlic, pickled in ganjang (soy sauce), rice vinegar and sugar. Garlic leaves and garlic shoots also get pickled the same way. We cat garlic shoots fried, often with fried dried shrimps; or blanched and dressed in sweetish chilli-based dressing. And then there is our national dish, kimchi - pickled vegetables - usually made with baechoo, the oriental cabbage (known as Napa cabbage in the US and Chinese leaves in the UK), although it could actually be any vegetable. If you know a little bit about Korean food, kimchi may immediately make you think of chilli powder. But there are in fact a few types of kimchi made without it. However, there is no kimchi made without garlic. Pretty much every Korean soup is made with a stock laced with garlic, whether it be meat-based or fish-based (typically using anchovy but also shrimp, dried mussel or even sea urchin). Most of those small dishes that cover tables at Korean meals (banchan, which translates as'accompaniments to rice') will have (raw, fried, or boiled) garlic irrespective of whether they contain vegetables, meat or fish, and whether raw, blanched, fried, stewed or boiled. We Koreans don't just eat garlic. We process it. In industrial quan-tities. We are garlic.

At the dawn of time, humans suffered in chaos and ignorance (so not much has changed, then). Taking pity on them, Hwanoong, a prince of the Heavenly Kingdom, came down to Earth to visit where Korea is today and established the City of God. Within the city he elevated the human race, giving them laws as well as knowledge about agriculture, medicine and the arts. Hwanoong was one day approached by a bear and a tiger. They had seen what he had done and, noting the way the world worked now, wanted to switch and become human. He promised them that they would each morph into human form if they went into a cave, avoided sunlight and ate only manul (garlic) and ssook* - for a hundred days. The animals decided to follow the instruction and entered a deep cave. After only a few days, the tiger rebelled. 'This is ridiculous. I can't live on some stinky bulbs and bitter leaves. I'm quitting,' he said - and swept out of the cave. The bear stuck with the diet and, after the one hundred days, became a beautiful woman, Woong-nyeo (literally Bear-Woman). Woong-nyeo later married Hwanoong and had a son, who became the first king of Korea, Dan-Goon.

British food culture in the 198os was - in a word - conservative, deeply so. The British ate nothing unfamiliar. Food considered foreign was viewed with near religious scepticism and visceral aversion. Other than completely Anglicized - and generally dire-quality - Chinese, Indian and Italian, you could not get any alternative cuisine, unless you travelled down to Soho or another sophisticated district in London. British food conservatism was for me epitomized by the now-defunct/then-rampant chain Pizzaland. Realizing that pizza could be traumatically 'foreign', the menu lured customers with an option to have their pizza topped with a baked potato. As with all discussions of foreignness, of course, this attitude gets pretty absurd when you scrutinize it. The UK's beloved Christmas dinner consists of turkey (North America), potatoes (Peru), carrots (Afghanistan) and Brussels sprouts (from, er, Belgium). But never mind that. Brits then simply didn't 'do foreign'.

The truth of the matter is that Korea then was even more of a culinary island than Britain, albeit one with much tastier food. In Korea in that era, aside from Chinese and Japanese places, we had little foreign food other than what was known as light West-ern', essentially 'Japanized' European food. Typical dishes were: tonkatsu (schnitzel made with pork, rather than the original Austrian creation with veal); hahmbahk (hamburger) steak (a pale imitation of the French steak haché, with cheap fillers, like onions and flour, replacing most of the beef); and (very mediocre) spaghetti Bolognese (which was simply called supageti). Hamburgers were a rarity, sold as exotic in the cafeterias of upmarket department stores - and weren't very good anyway. The arrival of Burger King in the mid 1980s was a cultural event. Most people first learned of pizza around then (Pizza Hut arrived in Seoul in 1985). Before coming to Britain and travelling for work or holiday to the contin-ent, I had never tasted real French or Italian food. The few French and Italian restaurants that we had in Korea at the time served highly Americanized versions. Asian food beyond Japanese or Chinese (no Thai, no Vietnamese, no Indian) was just as mysteri-ous, not to speak of dishes from more remote places like Greece, Turkey, Mexico or Lebanon.

While my food universe was expanding at lightning speed, the other universe of mine - economics - was, sadly, being sucked into a black hole. Up to the 1970s, economics was populated by a diverse range of 'schools' containing different visions and research methodologies - Classical, Marxist, Neoclassical, Keynes-ian, Developmentalist, Austrian, Schumpeterian, Institutionalist and Behaviouralist, to name only the most significant.* Not only did they coexist but they interacted with each other. Sometimes they clashed in a 'death match' - the Austrians vs. the Marxists in the 1920s and the 1930s, or the Keynesians vs. the Neoclassicals in the 196os and the 1970s. At other times, the interactions were more benign. Through debates and policy experiments tried by different governments around the world, each school was forced to hone their arguments. Different schools borrowed ideas from each other (often without proper acknowledgement). Some economists even tried the fusion of different theories. Economics until the 1970s was, then, rather like the British food scene today: many different cuisines, each with different strengths and weaknesses, competing for attention; all of them proud of their traditions but obliged to learn from each other; with lots of deliberate and unintentional fusion happening.