Chinese Cooking Demystified Substack
It’s a model of food that really underpins how people tend to think about, organize, and categorize food. Search Google Maps, and your local eateries are bound to be arranged into “Thai” or “Italian”. Hop over to Taste Atlas, and you’ll find little country flags next to each article. On Reddit’s /r/cooking, it’s practically a semi-annual tradition to see someone attempting to make ‘food around the world’, dutifully hopping around the globe nation-state by nation-state. When Good Mythical Morning guesses where a certain dish is around the world, they throw a dart at a map divided into… countries. These divisions can even turn into a political project – food slotting in right there next to the national anthem and the flag emoji.
And in fairness, it’s certainly not complete bullshit. Borders set trading networks, so they often set what ingredients are available. Borders (often) set a language, so they set the linguistic pathways of how recipes spread.
