The Middle East and Southeast Asia

Middle Eastern cuisine is best understood as a set of overlapping culinary traditions shared, with regional variation, across a diverse and historically interconnected region rather than as any single country’s possession. Staples such as hummus (a spread of cooked chickpeas, tahini, lemon, and garlic), falafel (fried patties of chickpeas or fava beans), flatbreads like pita, and a mezze culture of small shared dishes appear, with local variations, across Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Jordan, Israel, and beyond. Precisely because these dishes are so widely shared, and because the modern states of the region have distinct and sometimes contested national identities, questions of which country can claim a given dish as specifically "its own" have become genuinely contentious in public discourse, particularly regarding hummus and falafel between Israeli, Lebanese, and Palestinian communities, even though most food historians view these foods as belonging to a shared regional heritage that long predates the modern nation-state.