Korea — Beondegi and the Silkworm Pupa Tradition

What it is

Beondegi (번데기) are silkworm pupae (Bombyx mori), boiled or steamed and eaten as a street snack in South Korea. They represent one of the most distinctive and culturally specific insect foods in East Asia — a food that is simultaneously familiar to Korean consumers of multiple generations and profoundly alien to those encountering it without cultural context.

History & domestication

The Korean silkworm pupa tradition is directly linked to the silk industry. Korea has a long history of silk production, and silkworm pupae were historically a food of economic pragmatism — a protein source made available by the silk-reeling process at no additional cost. This is not unique to Korea: Japan's silk industry similarly generated silkworm pupae as a food product (Japanese sanagi). But in Korea, the practice of consuming beondegi became deeply culturally embedded, particularly through the rapid industrialization period of the 1960s and 1970s when beondegi carts were a fixture of urban street life and provided an accessible, inexpensive protein snack to urban workers.

The Specific Smell and Cultural Reaction: Beondegi has a smell that is immediately recognizable to Koreans who grew up in proximity to the tradition — rich, earthy, slightly fermented, unmistakably animal. The smell of beondegi cooking on a street cart is one of those sense-memories that Korean writers and food journalists frequently invoke as a nostalgic trigger: the smell of 1970s and 1980s Seoul, of school market stalls, of winter afternoons. The emotional valence of this smell is deeply positive for many older Koreans and associated with childhood memory and national developmental experience.

For younger urban Koreans and for Korean Americans, the reaction is more varied. There is a documented generational shift in beondegi consumption: middle-aged and older Koreans are far more likely to consume beondegi regularly than younger consumers in their twenties and thirties, who may find the smell challenging and associate the food with an older Korea rather than with contemporary food culture. This generational dynamic — in which an established insect food tradition declines in appeal among younger, more globalized, more food-culture-diverse urban consumers — is not unique to Korea and represents a real risk to traditional entomophagy practices in rapidly modernizing societies.

Beondegi are sold from street carts with a specific presentation: kept warm in a large pot of their cooking liquid, ladled into small paper cups with a toothpick for eating. The texture is soft and yielding, slightly gelatinous on the inside, with a skin that is slightly chewy. The flavor is earthy, savory, and slightly bitter — a flavor that, like many acquired tastes, is easier to appreciate with familiarity and context than without.

Beondegi are also sold in canned form in Korean supermarkets — a shelf-stable product that has extended their reach beyond street markets and has been a point of entry into the insect food conversation for non-Korean consumers encountering them in Korean grocery stores internationally.

Reference notes

Cross-link to: Korean cuisine; Silkworm; Silk production; Street food; Canned food.

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