Food Around the World — How Different Cultures Eat Smart

Every Culture I Have Ever Cooked With Has Taught Me Something I Couldn't Have Learned Any Other Way

Sometime in the 1990s, I started keeping a list. Every time I traveled — and I traveled a great deal, following food the way other people follow art or music — I wrote down the single most important thing I learned about how the people of that place ate. By now, the list is long. Japan: the philosophy of hara hachi bu, eating until you are eighty percent full. Morocco: the communal bowl, the sharing of food as an act of social trust. Mexico: the extraordinary sophistication of a cuisine built almost entirely on ingredients that grew in one place — corn, beans, chiles, squash, tomatoes, and chocolate — without which the entire Western food tradition would be unrecognizable. Greece: the radical simplicity of the best food, which asks for nothing more than extraordinary raw ingredients and the wisdom to leave them alone.

I grew up in an Italian-American family in Rhode Island, and Italian cooking was the lens through which I first came to understand food. That lens, I later realized, had given me certain advantages and certain blind spots. The advantages were real: I had grown up understanding that food is inseparable from family, that meals are ceremonies, that the quality of ingredients matters more than the complexity of technique, and that patience is a virtue that rewards you with flavor. The blind spots were equally real: I had grown up thinking, on some unexamined level, that the Mediterranean tradition was simply the best, the standard against which other cuisines should be measured.

Travel cured me of that. The first time I ate a properly prepared bowl of Japanese ramen — not the instant variety, but real ramen, the kind where the broth has simmered for eighteen hours and every component has been made with obsessive care — I sat in silence for several minutes before I could say anything. It was not Italian food. It was not trying to be Italian food. It was its own complete, sophisticated, deeply nutritional universe, built on principles of flavor and health that were entirely different from what I knew and equally valid. That was a humbling and liberating moment.

What I have come to understand, through decades of eating and cooking across cultures, is that the world's great food traditions are great for reasons that go far beyond tradition. They survived because they worked. The Mediterranean diet — olive oil, fish, legumes, whole grains, abundant vegetables, moderate amounts of everything else — is not celebrated by nutritional science because researchers decided to honor a charming European lifestyle. It is celebrated because study after study has found it to be among the most health-protective dietary patterns ever documented. The Japanese diet — rich in fish, fermented foods, seaweed, vegetables, and soy — is associated with some of the highest longevity rates on the planet. The traditional Mexican diet, built on the corn-and-bean combination that forms a complete protein, sustained complex civilizations for thousands of years before anyone had coined the word 'nutrition.'

The lesson I draw from this is not that any single culture has the perfect diet, but that the world's traditional food cultures, in their pre-industrial forms, all arrived at similar principles through very different paths: whole ingredients, minimal processing, balance among food groups, strong seasonality, communal eating, and reverence for the act of preparing and sharing food. These are not coincidences. They are convergent solutions to the same fundamental human problem: how to nourish a body well over a long life.

I have also learned, through cooking with people from dozens of traditions, that food is one of the most powerful bridges between human beings who have very little else in common.