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Consider the noodle... According to the World Instant Noodles Association (yes, such a body exists), South Koreans are among the biggest consumers of instant noodles, going through 79.7 servings per person a year. Given that there are just over 51 million of us, this works out to be around 4.1bn servings of instant noodles per year. That's a lot of noodles.

In the same way in which we turn all vegetables into kimchi, we Koreans turn almost every carbohydrate-rich grain and tuber into gooksoo - wheat, buckwheat, sweet potato, potato, sweetcorn, cassava, acorn, arrowroot, rice and more recently even barley. But in terms of the shape, Korean noodles have basically only two varieties - strips or strings.