The Nonequilibrium Nature of Culinary Evolution

TL;DR

This paper investigates the statistical patterns of ingredients and recipes across different cultures, proposing a copy-mutate model to explain culinary evolution and its cultural dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a novel copy-mutate model that captures the universal and culture-specific features of culinary evolution, supported by empirical data from diverse cookbooks.

Findings

Universal scale-invariant distributions in ingredient and recipe data

The model accurately fits empirical culinary data

Identification of a cultural founder effect in culinary evolution

Abstract

Food is an essential part of civilization, with a scope that ranges from the biological to the economic and cultural levels. Here we study the statistics of ingredients and recipes taken from Brazilian, British, French, and Medieval cookbooks. We find universal distributions with scale invariant behavior. We propose a copy-mutate process to model culinary evolution that fits very well our empirical data. We find a cultural founder effect produced by the nonequilibrium dynamics of the model. Both the invariant and idiosyncratic aspects of culture are accounted by our model, which may have applications in other kinds of evolutionary processes.