Geography and similarity of regional cuisines in China

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 have begun to provide unprecedented opportunities for data-driven, quantitative study of food culture....

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Bibliographic Details
Published inPloS one Vol. 8; no. 11; p. e79161
Main Authors Zhu, Yu-Xiao, Huang, Junming, Zhang, Zi-Ke, Zhang, Qian-Ming, Zhou, Tao, Ahn, Yong-Yeol
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States Public Library of Science 18.11.2013
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Subjects
Analysis
China
Climate
Computer science
Computers
Cooking
Cultural change
Culture
Databases, Factual
Datasets
Evolution
Evolution (Biology)
Food
Frequency distribution
Geography
Humans
Informatics
Ingredients
Internet
Nutrition research
Online databases
Principal components analysis
Recipes
Regional development
Regions
Repositories
Similarity
Sociology
Spices
World Wide Web
Zipf's Law
China
Beijing China
United States > US
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Summary: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 have 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 find that 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 for understanding the evolution of cuisines and cultures.
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Conceived and designed the experiments: YXZ JMH ZKZ QMZ TZ YYA. Performed the experiments: YXZ. Analyzed the data: YXZ ZKZ. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: YXZ YYA. Wrote the paper: YXZ JMH YYA.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0079161