The Universal Flavor Network Emerges

Flavor pyramids for North American and East Asian cuisines, credit - Barabasi Labs, 2011

Global diets are converging, with benefits and problems
Jan 2020, phys.org

They found what sounds like a two-way shift between Asian and Western countries, where Asia is eating more animals and the West eating less.

This idea of the global diet reminds me of the Flavor Networks of 2011, where they took all the molecules in all the ingredients of all the recipes ever (56,498), and linked them together. You can see one of their network graphs above, and the rest in the paper.

The graph shown above is the part related to this global diet shift. You can see that Western recipes are populated by animals, bread and butter, and Eastern cuisine is likely to have more vegetables.

There is another way to look at this which includes the homogeneity of the ingredients. Western recipes rely on similar ingredients. Cows and their butter are related. Wheat, which is a grass, is eaten by cows, so it's in their meat and their butter. If these are the staple foods, and staple flavors of the West, then  it would make sense that those recipes are more closely related, like family.

For the East, there is less focus on animals and more on vegetables. Flavorwise, it's a more adversarial arrangement. Think onions and garlic and sesame oil and of course soy sauce. Note that soy sauce actually gets its strong animal-like flavor not from an animal but from the complex of fermented by-products that develop as a result of the browning reactions that occur after purposefully-inoculated molds and bacteria have digested and transformed the soy-energy for a long time.

The vegetables aren't eating each other and becoming part of each other's bodies like cows and grass. They aren't related in that way, so their flavors are different, and they have to stand out from each other.

And one step further, consider Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel idea. In it he points out that Asia has less medium-sized domesticable animals as compared to Western Europe. This matches the respective diets we're talking about. He also points out that the West had wheat and the East had rice as the staple grain. Finally, he reminds us that the East is predominantly north-south in its axis and the West (both Europe and America) are more on an east-west axis.

Who cares? Plants care. Plants in the north need a very different algorithm than plants in the south, because of the change in day length. Those plants will be different, and any culture that lives on a north-south axis, eating lots of different plants, will produce a diet like the one described above.

The side-to-side shape of the West allows all the plants to be on the same daylight schedule, and thus similar algorithms overall, similar plants, similar flavors.

It might be interesting to compare some data from global trade over the past 50 years to see how it matches with these diet changes (because we've pretty much obliterated any east-west or north-south biases of a culture).

Post Script:
Soylent Green is people mixed with soy and lentils and fed back to people.

Russian space lettuce was grown on the International Space Station for astronauts.

Notes:
Multidimensional characterization of global food supply from 1961 to 2013.
James Bentham, Gitanjali M Singh, Goodarz Danaei, Rosemary Green, John K Lin, Gretchen A Stevens, Farshad Farzadfar, James E Bennett, Mariachiara Di Cesare, Alan D Dangour & Majid Ezzati. Nature Food volume 1, pages 70–75 (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s43016-019-0012-2.

Flavor network and the principles of food pairing.
Yong-Yeol Ahn, Sebastian E. Ahnert, James P. Bagrow & Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. Scientific Reports, published 15 December 2011. DOI: 10.1038/srep00196

FurFuryl Mercapton, Abstract Foods, and Flavor Networks
Network Address, 2012