National dishes, breakfasts and the dishes that belong to one valley, province or port: fabada in Asturias, Cornish pasties in Cornwall, takoyaki in Osaka. One map of what the world says it eats, built from Wikipedia and Wikidata, with honest gaps where the record is thin.
What does each country eat for breakfast? What about lunch and dinner, and which dish does each country hold up as its own? And can we go further than countries, to the dishes that belong to one region: fabada in Asturias, paella in Valencia, the hotpot in Lancashire? I tried to answer all of that on one map. The answer turned out to be part atlas and part lesson in what the open record knows and does not know about food.
The map below has four layers. National dishes come from Wikipedia's long list of dishes suggested as national dishes, which covers 186 countries and territories. Breakfast comes from Wikipedia's article on breakfast around the world, which describes 73 countries, each sorted here into one of eight styles. Regional dishes uses Wikidata, the open database behind Wikipedia, which records where 2,706 dishes come from inside a country. Main meal shows where the text says the main meal is eaten at midday and where in the evening. Zoom in on a country to see its regions, or search for a dish.
Wikipedia's list is careful to say it is not definitive: it gathers dishes that someone, somewhere, has called a national dish. That makes it a good mirror of what is claimed rather than what is eaten. Countries have a median of 2 suggestions; 90 have just one, and France has the most, 13. The first dish listed for each country is sorted into a dozen families using Wikidata's classes, with a few assigned from the dish's description.
The first-listed national dish, by family
Share of 186 countries and territories. Hover a bar for examples.
Meat and grills lead, with 42 countries (23%): asado, kebabs, schnitzel, Peking duck. Next come starchy staples (29), the stiff porridges of maize, cassava or plantain at the centre of the plate across much of Africa (fufu, nshima, sadza, ugali) along with Romania's mămăligă and Belgium's frites. Soups, stews and curries come third (27) and rice dishes fourth (24), from Central Asia's plov to the Gulf's kabsa and machboos. Some dishes cross borders: the maize porridge that Wikipedia files under Ugali is listed, under its local names, for 6 countries, and Couscous for 4 across North Africa.
Breakfast is the meal Wikipedia describes best country by country. Each country's section of the article is summarised here and given one of eight styles by the foods it names first. It is a summary of a summary, so the map is a sketch of habits, not a survey. Click a country on the Breakfast layer to see the foods behind its colour.
Breakfast styles
Number of countries in each style (73 described).
Europe splits neatly. Of the 25 European countries described, 17 start with bread and something savoury: cheese, cold meats, eggs, liver pâté, open sandwiches. Just 5 (France, Greece, Italy, Malta and Spain) are described with coffee and something sweet: a croissant, a cornetto, biscuits or toast with jam. Britain and Ireland sit with the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand in a style of their own: cereal and toast in the week, the cooked breakfast at weekends. Across Central America the morning plate is eggs, beans, tortillas and plantain; from Turkey to Iran and down the Nile it is flatbread with cheese, olives, eggs and beans; in Japan, Korea, Indonesia and the Philippines breakfast looks like any other meal, built on rice.
Inside countries, Wikidata is the only open record that ties dishes to places at scale. A dish is placed in a region when Wikidata says where it comes from or where it is located (most of them), when its cuisine is a regional cuisine, when its Wikipedia article is filed in a regional cuisine category, or, last, when its English name contains the place (Bath bun, Lancashire hotpot, Fabada asturiana). In all, 2,706 of the 8,363 Wikidata foods with a country (32%) can be placed in one of 485 regions.
The coverage is lumpy, and the lumps say more about Wikidata's volunteers than about food. Japan (505 dishes, every one of its 47 prefectures), Indonesia (490) and Italy (388) are rich because people there have catalogued local foods province by province. The top region on the whole map is Central Java in Indonesia, with 123. Mexico (21), Turkey (45) and Ireland (1) are thin, not because their food is less regional but because fewer dishes have a recorded home.
Dishes with a recorded region, by country
The 12 countries with the most placed dishes. Bars: dishes; label: regions with at least one.
Spain is where the question started, with fabada, the bean and pork stew of Asturias. Wikidata places 199 Spanish dishes in 17 of its 19 regions. Catalonia leads with 44 (crema catalana, pa amb tomàquet, fuet), then Andalusia (38, from gazpacho to salmorejo) and Castile and León (26). Paella sits in the Valencian Community; caldo galego and the octopus dish polbo á feira in Galicia.
Britain's regional dishes are mostly named after their towns, so the name rule matters most here: 41 British dishes are placed, led by the South West (9: Bath buns, stargazy pie, the Cornish pasty) and Scotland (6: Dundee cake, Arbroath smokies, Edinburgh rock). The North West has the Eccles cake, Lancashire hotpot and Kendal mint cake; Yorkshire its pudding and the Pontefract cake. These are the dishes named after a place, which is not always where they were first made.
I wanted a map of what each country eats for lunch and another for dinner. The open data will not support them. Wikidata records a 'course' for some dishes, and it is a useful test: 67 dishes are tagged as breakfast and 464 as a main course, across 79 countries, but 0 are tagged as lunch and 0 as dinner. Most dishes in most places can be eaten at either meal. So instead of lunch and dinner maps, the atlas offers two things the record does hold: the national and regional dishes above, which are mostly main dishes, and the question of which meal is the main meal.
Wikidata dishes tagged by course
Count of food items whose 'course' is each meal.
The cuisine articles and the articles on lunch and dinner state the main meal for 40 countries, plus a regional statement covering most Arab countries. In 34 of the 49 coded countries the main meal is at midday: Spain, Portugal, Greece, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Poland, Russia, Egypt, Indonesia and more. In 11 it is in the evening, including Britain, the United States, Canada, Sweden, Finland, India and Italy (where lunch is a full meal but lighter than supper). In Germany, Austria and Slovakia the sources describe a shift from a midday main meal to an evening one as working days moved away from home.
Spain's lunch runs from 13:00 to 15:00 and supper from 20:30 to 22:00. That looks late, until you remember that Spain's clocks run, on average across the year and the population, 104 minutes ahead of the sun (see How wrong is your clock?). Set by the sun, Spain's 2 pm lunch is at 12:16, 16 minutes after solar noon. Its supper, at 21:15 on the clock, is at 19:31 by the sun, only 24 minutes after Britain's average evening meal (19:07 by the sun, 19:48 on the clock). On the clock the gap is 87 minutes.
Meal times on the clock and by the sun
Middle of the stated lunch and dinner windows. Hollow: clock time. Solid: sun time (clock minus the country's average lead over the sun). 20 countries with lunch times.
By the sun, lunch clusters around midday almost everywhere: 17 of the 20 countries with a stated lunch time eat it before 1 pm sun time. The latest by the sun are Poland (14:43) and Mexico (14:24), where lunch, the main meal, runs into the afternoon on the clock as well.
National dishes. The data come from the 'By country' section of the English Wikipedia article 'National dish' (retrieved 29 October 2026): each line gives a country and the dishes suggested for it, and indented lines give parts of a country (England, Scotland, Asturias, Hawaii). Linked dishes were matched to Wikidata through the Wikipedia API, following redirects. Families come from Wikidata's 'subclass of' tree (rice dish, soup, stew, porridge and so on); for the few dishes the tree does not reach, the family is assigned from the dish's description. Photos are each dish's lead image on Wikipedia or Wikidata, shown only when Wikimedia Commons gives a free licence, with the author and licence under each one.
Breakfast. One style per country from the article 'Breakfast by country'. The style and the short list of foods summarise each section. The article covers 73 countries; others are left blank rather than guessed.
Regional dishes. The study takes every Wikidata item that is a dish, bread, cheese, sausage, pastry or dessert, leaves out brands, products, museum objects and fictional foods, and keeps 8,363 with a country of origin. Evidence for a region, strongest first: a place in the item's 'indigenous to', 'location', 'located in', 'location of creation' or 'place of origin' (1,742 dishes); a sub-national 'country of origin' (91); a regional 'cuisine' (173); membership of a Wikipedia regional cuisine category (520); and a place named in the dish's English name (180). Broad areas (continents, 'Southern United States', historical regions, peoples) never place a dish. Places become regions by point in polygon, using Natural Earth's states and provinces (merged into regions for Spain, Italy, France, Portugal and England). Dishes in a category must share the region's country; a few loose matches remain, and I would rather show them than hide the rule.
Main meal and times. Coded only where a sentence says which meal is the main or largest, or gives times. Sun time subtracts the country's population-weighted average lead of the clock over the sun, daylight saving included, from my clock-vs-sun study.
This is an atlas of what the open record says, not of what people eat every day. Wikipedia's lists are written by volunteers and lean towards English-language sources. Wikidata is far richer for Japan, Indonesia and Italy than for Mexico, Turkey, Ireland or most of Africa. 'Named after' a place does not mean invented there. Breakfast and meal times are summaries of short texts, not surveys. All counts are for 29 October 2026.