Food for thought: local restaurant diversity meets migration

Food is crucial for cultural identity. Yet, do migrants bring cultural identity with them? i.e., does migration go hand-in-hand with cuisine diversity? And does food diversity perhaps bring downsides?

I’ve been lucky enough to grow up eating mainly Lebanese food (the perks of having Lebanese family!) despite being raised in the not so spectacular culinary environment of the rural Netherlands. Personally, food always played a crucial role to keep in touch with my ancestry, yet can it generally be said that migrants take their local cuisine with them to remain connected? In other words, does food play a larger role than just providing the necessary calories? Let’s explore.

It seems to generally hold that migrants bring their food culture with them. The metropolitan cities of London, New York, Paris and Dubai definitely bring this point home.

To further explore where this food exactly comes from, it might help to look at the type of migrants. Let’s focus on the most food diverse city: London.

We can see that Italian food is definitely overrepresented compared to number of first and second generation migrants. Perhaps cultural closeness matters? Asian and Indian food are well represented, reflecting the migration numbers in London. So, migration seems to bring diverse food, but are there also downsides? Let’s zoom out again to examine that. First, do migrants also bring the cooking talents?

If one considers Michelin stars, specialization in the homogenous Japanese society in Tokyo and Kyoto might actually pay off rather than diversity. Perhaps the best cooks remain put in their origin countries?

Next, does food diversity come with a price tag?

It seems so! Certainly bring money when exploring the diverse cuisines in New York, London and Dubai. I guess no big surprise that food diversity comes at a cost, like most good things.

My take-away? Migrants bring their cultures and food diversity to perhaps not so traditionally culinary cities (personally, traditional British and American cuisine are not so high up in my lists…) Also, if one wants the highest quality and cheapest food, sacrifices seem to have to be made in terms of food diversity. In any case, hopefully this offered some food for thought:) As always my code will be available in my Github.