Cuisine Pyramids are now available as posters

If you had to explain a country’s cuisine in one picture, what would you put at the bottom? And what deserves a place at the very top?

This question eventually turned into the What The World Eats Cuisine Pyramids.

Most ways of presenting a cuisine focus on its most famous dishes. But famous doesn’t necessarily mean everyday, and everyday doesn’t necessarily mean unimportant. A cuisine is built from both.

The pyramids run from bottom to top. At the base are the foods and ingredients that form everyday eating. Moving upward, the focus shifts from frequency and volume towards cultural weight: characteristic ingredients, distinctive preparations that strongly define the cuisine.

Ingredients sit on the left, dishes on the right.

I originally made the pyramids as part of my research. I liked the finished maps enough that I wanted them to exist beyond the screen.

The first What The World Eats Cuisine Pyramid posters are now available on Etsy, as printed posters and digital downloads.

More countries are coming!

Best,
Ieva