I’ve written before about methods to quantify cooking and cuisine similarities. Well, in a new paper posted to the arXiv, researchers have explored China’s regional cuisines and found that similarities are due to geography and not climate similarities (which might be assumed, due to allowing one to grow the same foods). What this means is that cuisine is much more of a cultural artifact, that can spread and change. Here’s the abstract, which highlights a fun data source:

Food occupies a central position in every culture and it is therefore of great interest to understand the evolution of food culture. The advent of the World Wide Web and online recipe repositories has begun to provide unprecedented opportunities for data-driven, quantitative study of food culture. Here we harness an online database documenting recipes from various Chinese regional cuisines and investigate the similarity of regional cuisines in terms of geography and climate. We found that the geographical proximity, rather than climate proximity is a crucial factor that determines the similarity of regional cuisines. We develop a model of regional cuisine evolution that provides helpful clues to understand the evolution of cuisines and cultures.