Thai cuisine has become a rockstar of culinary world. Thai flavors have spread to nearly every corner of the globe over the past half-century and have grown widely-beloved the world over. This year CNN held an international poll asking readers for their fifty favorite foods, and six of the fifty chosen dishes originated from Thailand, more than any other single country (Cheung). In 2010, Bangkok was listed as the third most popular urban tourist destination in the world, beaten out only by London and New York City (Brenmer). In the World Tourism Organization’s 2013 rankings, the nation of Thailand was ranked the tenth top tourist destination in the world, attracting 26.5 million international visitors, and by 2016 that number had risen to 32.5 million (UNWTO). Thai restaurants and chefs, both local and international, regularly win international culinary awards, such as American chef Andy Ricker’s restaurant Pok Pok receiving Michelin stars in 2015 (Adamczyk). Despite the immense economic and cultural pressures that such thriving culinary tourism and international attention bring to an underdeveloped country, Thai cuisine has remained remarkably resistant to change; this resistance is a function both of the singular tastes of the local Thai population and of a conscious effort to retain the “authenticity” of Thai dishes.

The people of Thailand are descendents of a Tai-speaking people that migrated to the region from southern China, northern Vietnam, and northeastern India, and the culinary traditions and crops they brought with them laid the groundworks for the development of Thai cuisine

(Hafner, Keyes and Keyes). Thai cuisine developed largely independently from the world outside of Southeast Asia thanks to its isolating geographic boundaries, such as dense jungle, expansive mountain ranges, and the seafare-disrupting Malay peninsula. They cooked with local ingredients: fresh fish caught in the region’s countless streams and rivers, galangal, kafir limes and their leaves, jasmine rice, glutinous rice, water fowl, and, eventually, cattle, pork, and chicken. By the 16th century, much of modern Thailand was governed by semi-autonomous principalities and city-states that swore allegiance to a single king (“History”).

In 1511, the Thai royal court in the city-state of Ayutthaya received their first diplomatic misson from a European power: the Portuguese(“History”). This event marks the beginning of the narrative we are focusing on today: international influence on Thai cuisine. This is perhaps the single most important event in that narrative, as the Portuguese are believed to have introduced chili’s to the region (Thanes). Chilis and their byproducts are now an essential part of most Thai meals. Today, Thai food’s most well-known attribute is most likely the intense spiciness it derives from these chilis.

One could argue that, other than the introduction of New World crops such as cashews and peanuts, Thailand largely evaded or ignored outside culinary influence for the next four centuries. In 1897, King Chulalongkorn of Siam (Thailand’s name from 1855-1939) went on his first of two long voyages touring Europe. He despised the majority the food he ate on his trips, opting instead to subsist on Thai dishes made from ingredients local or brought along on the voyage, such as fried eggs dipped in shrimp sauce or boiled rice mixed with nam phrik phao (a paste of red chiles and ground shrimp). He was, however, delighted by a number of French dishes, including pressed duck, baguettes, and a creamy seafood soup, all of which he called “very delicious”. When King Chulalongkorn arrived home in Siam, he wrote what was likely the first ever Western Cookbook written in the Thai language. In it, he focused largely on on the two ethnic cuisines he found edible, French and English, and so these are the two most popular and influential non-Asian cuisines (Thanes).

If Thailand did not discover the rest of the world until 1897, the rest of the world did not discover Thailand until the 1960’s, when communist conflicts broke out in Vietnam. The American military presence in Bangkok did much to introduce the cuisine of central Thailand to American culture, including dishes such as tom yam soup and green curry. However, it also funded restaurants that appealed to American tastebuds. When Americans left in the 1970s, many of these restaurants shut down due to lack of demand, but a surprising influence

remained: American Italian food. By the late 1990’s, pizza was extremely popular, and Thai locals had thoroughly appropriated and altered pizza to fit with Thai tastes. Today, pizza served in Thailand is commonly served with “tam yam kung” (hot and sour prawn soup) toppings or other similarly Thai flavors, and most Thais prefer to eat their pizza with ketchup, with most fast-food pizzarias supplying customers with four to five packets of ketchup.The authenticity (or clear lack thereof) of this “Italian” cuisine, and indeed of the country’s other appropriated cuisines, English and French, are apparently of little concern to the average Thai, who flock to restaurants that openly advertise their inauthenticity. One popular restaurant in the business district of Bangkok has placed a banner on their storefront advertising “Italian Food with Thai Flavor” (Thanes).

Despite Thais’ disregard for “authentic” foreign foods, the Thai government, perhaps realizing how intensely profitable a popular national cuisine is, has taken steps in the last decade to cement authenticity within their own cuisine. One of the most fascinating examples is the so-called “Thai Delicious Project.” Under this project, a robot was designed to measure the authenticity of Thai dishes. It uses ten sensors to

measure levels of certain chemicals and compare it to levels considered ideal by the Thai government. The robot scores the dish on a 100-point scale, with 80 as the passing grade. The explicit intention of the project is the protect Thai cuisine from the  bastardization that comes with tourism, to protect the integrity of Thai cuisine served abroad, and to develop up-to-standard Thai food ready to be shipped internationally for commercial use (Fuller).

 

 

Thai consumers have certain expectations when it comes to their meals. Thais at large consider most Western foods much too “lian” or rich, as well as sorely lacking in the spices and flavors that they are accustomed to (Thanes). Just like King Chulalongkorn a century prior, it is common practice for modern tour guides taking Thai tourists outside of Asia to carry chilli paste and fish sauce for the entire journey. Even within the country’s own borders, the merits of a particular fish sauce or chili paste are likely to be hotly debated. It is perhaps this singular Thai palate that has resulted in Thailand’s highly resilient cuisine.