You Eat Where You Live

Every major cuisine is a direct product of local geography and climate. Rice dominates in monsoon Asia because it needs flooded fields and steady warmth. Wheat thrives in temperate grasslands, which is why bread cultures stretch from France through the Middle East to northern India.

Corn was domesticated in Mesoamerica's warm valleys, while potatoes evolved in the high, cold Andes where almost nothing else would grow. Spice-heavy cuisines like Indian and Thai grew up in the tropics, where the spices themselves grew naturally. A long-popular idea held that heavy spicing was a defense against spoilage, since many spices kill microbes, but a large 2021 study of more than 30,000 recipes found little support for that link and tied spice use more closely to wealth and culture. Either way, your grandmother's recipes are a geography lesson.