And to the Swedes who had to vote 'other' for their own cuisine

The Spaniards who don't like Moroccan is 100% nationalism.

Italians hating on China: "eeey ohh marone they stole our fuggin' noodles forgettaboutit!"

A Subway opened up 4 doors down from the local Vietnamese bakery near where I used to live. The Subway was consistently empty during the banh mi shop's trading hours. The Subway cleared out after 6 ish months. These "entrepreneurs" seriously did 0 market research. Subway costs more, tastes worse and had worse music playing.

Japanese cuisine is the blandest of all the Asian cuisines so it kinda tracks that Western Europeans prefer it. But it is also definitely racism cause Japanese culture still has this allure of being "sophisticated" relative to their neighbors.

The results for Italy are wild. How can you hate Chinese and Indian food?

Chinese food in Europe is generally pretty bland and tailored to the older generations who can't handle heat and don't like foreign spices. I've never been to China, but I've heard you can't really call it "Chinese".

Compare it to Thai food, which is usually a lot more authentic, which is liked a lot more on the chart here.

The whole thing we do where we put specific foods in specific countries is also just ridiculous and only serves to reinforce nationalism. It doesnt help my argument that there is a group of Brits who seem to insist on only cooking their stereotypical foods out of some sort of national pride, but they've just fallen for their own propaganda. Jellied eels is a meme and geezers insist upon it, but they're geezers so fuck em.
It's the same here in Denmark where we have so many people thinking all danish food is just pork. Ridiculous. Pick up an almanac or something from before factory farming and you'll find so many fantastic seasonal and regional dishes.
On top of that as a society we decide that newer foods "don't count" somehow. British curry isn't really British, because it's made by immigrants. The Danish variation of Dürum is still just middle Eastern food because people from the middle East can't be Danish. It just reinforced conservative ideas of nationhood.

::: spoiler Also classism.
Hate when people go "ewwww pig knuckles" (for non-vegan reasons, I love it when they do it because eating animals is nasty). You fucking philistines would have balled at eating lobster until the nice man on TV told you it was classy actually. Try the dish and evaluate it on that instead of some arbitrary idea of what part of food is nasty - For some reason the cut of meat that's the animals ass is often good? That's close to shit! Ewwwwww. Also don't eat meat.

Just like American music

I heard Israelis had the shittiest food.

swedish food also has alkaline horrors unfit for human consumption

Fuck that shit, I lived in Germany for 3 years and they have unambiguously bad food. 90% of people have a slice of bread with bologna on top for 2/3 meals a day. It's ok that some countries don't prioritize food culturally, but let's not pretend German cuisine is comparable to 90% of things on the list

A lot of it is vegan and a lot of it is spicy and flavourful, those two factors are the main reason, I think.

Same. Like take it from someone who grew up in a stereotypical American “Italian” home… naan is literally pizza crust and eating curry, a spiced tomato sauce with it? Please give me more of that. Oh, and samosas are so good.

Not really surprising, colonialism often includes exchanging foods. Britons are racist towards Indians but curry is popular there. Rijsttafel in the Netherlands is really just nasi padang from Indonesia, and Indonesian restaurants are, I believe, popular in the Netherlands. Obviously there's a lot of French influence on contemporary Vietnamese cuisine (banh mi!) and I wouldn't be at all surprised if it also went the other way. I mean spices were a major reason that south/south east Asia were colonised in the first place.

I still remember the first time I watched a Dutchman eat a wedge of cheese like it was an apple.

There really isn’t much difference between the food in Britain, Germany, Sweden, etc. For example, they all basically do the same sausage and potatoes with poorly seasoned vegetables dish, just like every state in the US claims that they have a special version of pizza or hotdogs or whatever even though it’s really all just the same shit. It’s the narcissism of small differences.

Oh my god in Sweden they have lingonberry jam on toast but in the UK they have marmalade on toast and in Germany they’ll put Nutella on toast holy shit so different.