ChoeAe Notes

From Doughnuts to Lemonade: How Food Became a Language of Identity in K-pop

If someone asked you what K-pop tastes like, you would probably laugh.

Music is something we hear. Sometimes it is something we see through choreography, styling or music videos. Rarely do we think of it as something we can taste.

And yet, over the past few years, K-pop seems to have developed an unexpected appetite for food and drink.

We have wandered through God’s Menu, fallen in love over Doughnut and Alcohol-Free, smoothed ourselves with Butter, cooled down with Cream Soda, transformed lemons into LEMONADE, declared ourselves Sugar Honey Ice Tea, and even compared confidence to a bag of Takis.

At first glance, these titles seem like playful marketing. Food is colourful, universally recognisable and easy to build a concept around. But after reading the lyrics behind many of these songs, I started wondering whether something more interesting was happening.

The songs weren’t actually talking about food.

They were using food to talk about us.

Or, perhaps more accurately, about who idols are becoming.

This is not a scientific theory, nor is it a rule that applies to every release. However, placing songs from different generations side by side reveals an intriguing evolution. Food and drink have always been part of K-pop, but their symbolic role appears to have expanded dramatically over the past decade. What once served mainly as a metaphor for romance and emotion increasingly functions as a language of identity, transformation, artistic confidence and even cultural influence.

Perhaps food has not changed.

Perhaps the way K-pop tastes has.

When sweetness meant love

Food has been part of K-pop almost since the beginning.

One of the earliest examples is H.O.T.’s Candy, released in 1996. The title perfectly reflected first-generation idol aesthetics: bright colours, youthful optimism and innocent romance. The sweetness of candy wasn’t there to say anything about status or identity. It simply reinforced the feeling of first love and youthful happiness.

For many years, this remained one of the primary functions of food imagery.

It helped artists describe emotions.

TWICE’s Doughnut is perhaps one of the clearest modern examples.

Despite its sweet title, the song is surprisingly melancholic. The lyrics repeatedly return to the image of “a hole shaped like you.” The doughnut is not important because it is sugary or comforting. It is important because of its empty centre.

That empty space becomes a metaphor for absence.

The beloved has left behind a space that nothing else can fill.

The object itself almost disappears as the emotional symbolism takes over.

Something similar happens in Alcohol-Free. Once again, the song is not interested in drinks for their own sake. Instead, cocktails become a vocabulary for describing love.

“I’m alcohol-free, but I’m drunk.”

The contradiction immediately tells us everything we need to know. No alcohol has been consumed, yet the speaker feels intoxicated simply by being near the person they love.

Later, the lyrics continue:

“You’re my champagne, my wine, my tequila, margarita…”

Each drink represents another shade of emotional excitement. The beverages are metaphors for the beloved’s effect on the singer rather than objects with independent symbolic meaning.

BTS’s Coffee works in much the same way. Coffee becomes a way of expressing the bittersweet aftertaste of a relationship. Once again, flavour is tied directly to emotion.

Looking across these songs, a common thread begins to emerge.

Food rarely describes the artist.

Instead, it describes someone else.

The emotional centre lies outside the speaker.

Love changes them.

Memory shapes them.

Longing defines them.

Even the grammar reflects this.

“I’m drunk because of you.”

“There is a hole shaped like you.”

The singer receives emotion.

Food functions as an emotional metaphor.

Not yet as identity.

For years, this seemed to be the dominant language of food in K-pop.

Then, somewhere around the early 2020s, something quietly began to change.

The songs did not stop talking about food.

But they started asking it to do something entirely different.

A recipe for confidence

If there is one song that marks this transition particularly clearly, it is Stray Kids’ God’s Menu.

On the surface, it looks like another playful food concept. Menus, restaurants and cooking have appeared in music before. But God’s Menu is not really interested in cuisine.

It is interested in authorship.

The now-famous lyric,

“Cooking like a chef, I’m a five-star Michelin,”

immediately transforms cooking into a metaphor for artistic creation.

The members are not serving meals.

They are serving their music.

The menu becomes their catalogue.

The kitchen becomes the studio.

The chef becomes the producer.

Most importantly, the song repeatedly insists that nobody else can reproduce what Stray Kids create. Cooking is no longer a romantic metaphor; it becomes proof of originality.

Food has shifted from describing feelings to describing artistic identity.

This change becomes even more interesting when compared with songs released shortly afterwards.

BTS’s Butter is not about butter.

NCT DREAM’s Hot Sauce is not about hot sauce.

EXO’s Cream Soda is not really about a soft drink.

Instead, each title communicates a quality.

Smooth.

Spicy.

Refreshing.

Irresistible.

The food no longer exists to tell us how somebody feels.

It tells us what kind of artist they are.

Taste itself becomes personality.

From flavour to identity

If God’s Menu opened the door, later releases began exploring just how flexible food metaphors could become.

One of the most debated examples is NewJeans’ Cookie.

Regardless of the discussions surrounding the song, what makes Cookie particularly interesting is that the cookie itself never really remains a cookie. Instead, it becomes a symbolic object whose meaning depends entirely on interpretation. The lyrics invite the listener to “take a look” and “taste it,” transforming an ordinary dessert into something that carries layers of desire, curiosity and identity.

Whether listeners read those layers as playful, romantic or provocative, one thing is clear: the food has stopped functioning simply as food. It has become a symbolic object that asks the audience to participate in constructing its meaning.

In that sense, Cookie occupies an important place in this evolution. It sits somewhere between the older romantic tradition and the newer identity-driven approach. The object itself is no longer enough; what matters is what it represents.

A similar process can be observed in Red Velvet’s Red Flavor.

Unlike Doughnut, the song is not centred on longing. Instead, “flavour” becomes an atmosphere. The colour red evokes fruit, summer, excitement and energy all at once. The title is less interested in describing a particular food than in creating a sensory identity for the entire comeback.

This is perhaps where another important shift begins to appear.

Food is no longer only something characters experience.

It becomes something artists embody.

When life gives aespa lemons

Among all the recent food-related titles, aespa’s LEMONADE may be the most unusual.

At first glance, it seems to belong to the same family as Hot Sauce or Cream Soda. Another drink. Another colourful concept.

But the lyrics suggest something quite different.

The chorus repeatedly declares:

“I’ll make it lemonade.”

Taken on its own, the line immediately recalls the familiar expression:

“When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”

Rather than describing sweetness, the song describes transformation.

The surrounding lyrics reinforce this idea.

aespa sing about mixing problems together, grinding up lemons and drinking them anyway. Difficult experiences are not avoided; they are processed, remixed and turned into something new.

“Mixing all the tangled problems.”

“All the lemons, I grind them up and drink them.”

The metaphor is surprisingly active.

Unlike the singers in Alcohol-Free or Doughnut, aespa are no longer waiting for emotions to happen to them.

They are doing something.

They mix.

They grind.

They make.

They transform.

This is where another pattern quietly begins to emerge.

Looking back across these songs, the evolution is not only visible in the metaphors themselves.

It is visible in the verbs.

Earlier songs are filled with verbs such as miss, love, fall, remember and drink. The speaker is shaped by emotion.

More recent songs introduce a different vocabulary.

Cook.

Serve.

Taste.

Mix.

Grind.

Make.

The artist becomes the active force behind the metaphor.

Even the grammar begins to change.

In Doughnut, there is a hole shaped like you.

In Alcohol-Free, you are the champagne, the wine and the tequila.

The emotional centre of the sentence lies outside the singer.

Then something shifts.

Stray Kids begin cooking.

aespa begin making lemonade.

The metaphor no longer describes what somebody else does to the artist.

It describes what the artist chooses to become.

Food has stopped being merely descriptive.

It has become constructive.

It builds identity instead of simply illustrating emotion.

And perhaps nowhere is that evolution more visible than in some of the most recent releases from fourth- and fifth-generation girl groups.

Because food is no longer just something to make.

It is increasingly something to consume.

Consuming the idol

If aespa’s LEMONADE transforms food into a metaphor for reinvention, some of the newest K-pop releases push the symbolism even further.

Food no longer describes emotion.

It no longer simply helps construct identity.

Increasingly, it presents the artist as something to be consumed.

One of the latest examples is MEOVV’s DDI RO RI.

The food references are brief but revealing.

“Fresh out the freezer, get a taste.”

“You crave it like a fiend.”

Placed alongside lyrics such as “You know I’m the blueprint” and “I be on that new shit,” these lines suggest that the group itself has become the object of consumption. The audience is invited not simply to listen, but to taste, crave and ultimately recognise MEOVV as something new and impossible to imitate.

Consumption becomes a metaphor for cultural influence.

A similar idea appears in KATSEYE’s Gnarly, where one of the song’s most memorable lines compares the speaker to “a bag of Takis” before declaring:

“I’m the shit.”

The comparison is surprisingly effective. Takis are not simply a snack; they are a recognisable cultural product associated with boldness, intensity and addictive flavour. The metaphor transfers those qualities directly onto the performer.

The message is simple.

Everybody knows Takis.

Everybody wants Takis.

Therefore…

Everybody should want me too.

BABYMONSTER’s Sugar Honey Ice Tea plays a similar game, but with an even cleverer twist.

At first, the title sounds playful and harmless.

Sugar.

Honey.

Ice tea.

Then the initials quietly reveal themselves:

S.H.I.T.

The drink suddenly becomes a coded declaration of confidence.

The lyrics leave little room for doubt:

“Ain’t no other baddie like me.”

“Wanna get like me? You wish.”

Rather than describing a flavour, the drink becomes another way of declaring superiority. Sweetness becomes camouflage for one of the boldest statements in the song.

When food refuses to leave

Not every contemporary food metaphor revolves around confidence.

LE SSERAFIM’s Spaghetti introduces yet another fascinating variation.

One of the song’s central images compares the group to spaghetti stuck between someone’s teeth.

It is an unexpectedly ordinary image.

Everyone knows the feeling.

You finish eating, smile, carry on with your day… and then, hours later, realise something is still there.

The metaphor works precisely because it is so familiar.

Rather than asking to be remembered, LE SSERAFIM suggest they are impossible to forget. Like spaghetti caught between your teeth, they linger long after the first encounter.

Once again, the food itself is not the message.

Its behaviour is.

More than a metaphor

Of course, the songs discussed here represent only part of a much wider landscape. Contemporary K-pop continues to return to the language of taste and sensation through titles such as ITZY’s ICY, aespa’s Spicy, BABYMONSTER’s Hot Sauce, Hearts2Hearts’ Lemon Tag, TXT’s Sugar Rush Ride, YOUNG POSSE’s Macaroni Cheese, Saja Boys’ Soda Pop and many others. Some draw on flavour, others on temperature, texture or even the physical experience of eating, but together they suggest that contemporary K-pop has developed an increasingly rich symbolic vocabulary rooted in everyday sensory experiences. Not all of these songs use food or sensation in the same way, nor do they all support the same interpretation. Yet taken together, they reveal how taste, heat, sweetness, spice and even coldness have become remarkably flexible tools through which artists communicate emotion, attitude, identity and cultural presence.

Looking back across the songs explored in this essay, it becomes difficult to argue that food and drink perform a single symbolic function in K-pop.

A doughnut can represent absence.

A cocktail can represent love.

A menu can represent artistic creation.

A lemonade can represent transformation.

A plate of spaghetti can represent persistence.

A bag of Takis can represent cultural status.

A sugar honey ice tea can become a coded declaration of confidence.

The metaphor has not been replaced.

It has expanded.

Perhaps the most revealing evolution is not the food itself, but the role it plays within the sentence.

Earlier songs often placed another person at the centre of the story.

“You make me drunk.”

“There is a hole shaped like you.”

The singer receives emotion.

Many contemporary songs reverse that relationship.

“Cooking like a chef.”

“I’ll make it lemonade.”

“I’m the sugar honey ice tea.”

The artist becomes the active force.

The creator.

The product.

The brand.

This is not to suggest that romance has disappeared from K-pop, nor that every food-themed release follows the same trajectory. Rather, these examples suggest that food—and, perhaps more broadly, sensory experience—has become an increasingly rich symbolic language. A language capable of expressing love, absence, artistic confidence, transformation, persistence, branding and cultural influence.

Perhaps that is precisely why these metaphors continue to appear.

Sweetness.

Bitterness.

Spice.

Heat.

Coldness.

Craving.

Satisfaction.

They are sensations every listener understands instinctively. Universal experiences, yet flexible enough to carry remarkably different meanings.

Maybe that is why modern K-pop keeps returning to them.

Not because artists are singing about food.

But because food—and, more broadly, sensory experience—has become one of the richest languages through which K-pop can talk about itself.

So perhaps the question is no longer simply,

“What does this song mean?”

Perhaps the more interesting question is:

What does K-pop taste like?

Further listening

• H.O.T. – Candy
• BTS – Coffee
• TWICE – Doughnut
• TWICE – Alcohol-Free
• Stray Kids – God’s Menu
• NewJeans – Cookie
• Red Velvet – Red Flavor
• aespa – LEMONADE
• MEOVV – DDI RO RI
• LE SSERAFIM – Spaghetti
• BABYMONSTER – Sugar Honey Ice Tea
• KATSEYE – Gnarly

Music doesn’t end when the song is over. Sometimes, that’s where the most interesting conversations begin. If you enjoyed this reading, follow ChoeAe Notes for more essays, analyses and deep explorations into the worlds hidden inside K-pop.

Sources consulted

This essay draws on official lyrics, music videos and album materials from the artists discussed, alongside publicly available interviews, comeback promotions and commentary from entertainment outlets including Genius Lyrics, Billboard, Teen Vogue, Soompi, The Korea Times and other music journalism sources. As with all ChoeAe Notes essays, the interpretations and critical analysis presented here are my own.