249 foods

Food. Culture. History. 249 places.

I’m on a quest to discover the world through its food. From my home city of London, this blog is an excuse to go on a voyage of culinary discovery, find some new recipes and hidden gems and quite literally eat the world.

For each worldly place expect a potentially-accurate potted history and an amateur dissection of its people, national identity, society and/or culture, all through the lens of its food.

There might also be a restaurant review and maybe a recipe or 2.

First up is deciding where to start, and even before that, what’s on the list. As a statist, the 196 UN member states seem a good place to start. This approach is ok but there’s a thorny issue of disputed places like Palestine and Taiwan, who aren’t yet in but surely have a food culture worthy of exploration.

The International Organisation for Standardisation, who sound wild, have a list of 249 countries including aforementioned thorns, plus some exotic-sounding additions. Not wanting to miss out on the foods of Christmas Island, Curaçao and – naturally – the Cook Islands, this looks like the list for me.

So decision made on the list, and having debated at length the topic of order (random vs alphabetical), off I go to randomly trot the globe on a gastronomic mission to eat the world.