Inside the meeting room, the numbers just won't line up. Both sides are digging in. By the third time the same sentence gets repeated, someone lets out a sigh and says it. "Let's eat first, then we'll talk." If you're the foreign partner in the room, this is the moment your eyebrows go up. Wait — are we stopping the meeting because we're hungry? The negotiation is stuck, everyone's on edge, and someone just suggested lunch. In the last piece , we looked at "Did you eat?" as a greeting, and "let's grab a meal sometime" as the phrase Koreans use to leave a door open when they part ways. But it turns out meals play an even bigger role once you step into a Korean business setting. The role just changes shape depending on where you are in the relationship. There's a meal that starts things off, a meal that keeps the door ajar, and — as in that tense meeting room above — a meal that talks a deal back from the edge. "Shall...
Growing up, the moment I took off my shoes at the door, my grandmother's words were already waiting for me. "Have you eaten yet? Go eat something." She asked every single time she saw me — even right after I'd told her I just had. As a kid, I hated hearing it. Does she really think I can't feed myself? Such needless worrying, I used to think, more than a little sulky about it. But somewhere along the way, I noticed I'd started saying it myself, several times a day — to a coworker on my way into the office, to a friend after lunch, to my parents on the phone in the evening. So why do we even ask this in the first place? I got curious enough to actually look into it. Not a Greeting. A Way of Checking In. Here's the short answer: "Did you eat?" was never meant as a greeting. Digging into it, I found that my grandmother's constant asking carried a heavier story than I'd realized. Korea was an agricultural society for most of its histo...