More than 3,000 housewives make kimchi for the poor in preparation for winter at the City Hall of Seoul on Nov. 13, 2013 in Seoul, South Korea. Kimchi is a traditional dish of fermented vegetables mixed with chili and eaten with rice or served as a side dish. (Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images)

Dressed in surgical masks and rubber gloves and armed with 61,700 cabbages, 3,000 South Korean women recently gathered in Seoul to make the traditional staple dish of Korea — kimchi.

The saltwater-marinated, spicy fermented cabbage dish is so popular, the average Korean eats about 40 pounds of it a year, says Health Magazine. And because the ingredients — cabbage, radishes, green onions and chili peppers — are at their freshest in November, the month is traditionally a time for family members and neighbors to gather together to make kimchi that will be fermented for several months.

According to CNN, the 3,000 housewives who gathered in front of Seoul's City Plaza were volunteers participating in a tradition of making kimchi for 25,000 low-income families in the city. The event began in 2001 and since then has grown larger with each passing year. This year the volunteers made 250 tons of kimchi in just four hours.

But it's not just low-income families who have a hard time getting all the kimchi they want. Since 2006, South Korea has run a "kimchi deficit," says AFP. Because Chinese kimchi is so much cheaper than homemade Korean kimchi (800 won per kilo for the former compared to 3,000 won per kilo in Korea), more kimchi is imported than is exported.

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It didn't help matters that in 2010, bad weather halved the cabbage crop, sending cabbage prices soaring just around the time when Koreans were turning out in droves to buy cabbage for their kimchi, reported NPR.

"I have to get my kimchi fix with every meal or I'm not completely satiated," Kim Chang-Wan, a Seoul businessman, told NPR.

For a country that has a kimchi museum, an annual kimchi festival, a global kimchi research center, and even an astronaut who took kimchi to space with him, a kimchi crisis is a threat not just to the stomach, but also the South Korea's cultural heritage. But there are hopes that UNESCO will honor the dish with intangible cultural heritage designation, reported AFP, which could help preserve the dish and protect its place in Korean culture.

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