Citing a research study from Beijing Computational Science Research Center that has categorized 8,500 recipes from across China, The Atlantic’s Matt Schiavenza encourages Americans to appreciate the diversity of Chinese cuisine:
MIT Technology Review tells us a bit more about how they did it:
They began by downloading all the recipes from a Chinese recipe website called Meishijie. This contained almost 8500 recipes based on nearly 3000 ingredients. They grouped the recipes according to their origin in one of 20 regions. Finally they created a food web consisting of the set of all recipes on the set of all ingredients. Where recipe contains an ingredient they draw a link between them. Since each recipe belongs to anyone regional cuisines these links can then also be categorised into cuisines. Counting these links shows how prevalent each ingredient is in each cuisine.[Source]
Schiavenza adds: “So the next time your friend invites you out for Chinese food, be sure to ask him to specify whether it’s Chuan or YunGui, northwestern or northeastern. And if you really want to impress him, try ordering in Wu, Cantonese, or Tajik. It’ll work. Trust me.”
