"How Snobbery Helped Take The Spice Out Of European Cooking"

"A recent study tried to explain the divide in Eastern and Western culinary philosophy through some nifty data crunching. Researchers from the Indian Institute for Technology in Jodhpur looked up the ingredient lists for more than 2,000 Indian recipes. They then analyzed the chemical components of these ingredients, looking at the compounds that, when combined, give foods their taste.

They concluded that what makes Indian cuisine so exquisite is its tendency to bring together lots of different ingredients with flavor molecules that don't overlap.

That's quite different from how Western cuisine works — previous research has shown that it relies on pairing ingredients that, at the molecular level, share lots of similar flavor compounds.

While some have praised the new research for revealing the secret to why Indian cuisine is so delicious, this notion of layering many contrasting flavors and spices isn't unique to Indian cooking.

In fact, most of the world's cuisines tend to follow that principle, says Tulasi Srinivas, an anthropologist at Emerson University who studies food and globalization. And up until the mid-1600s, European cuisine was the same way."
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2015/03/26/394339284/how-snobbery-helped-take-the-spice-out-of-european-cooking?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20150326

Molecular traces of classism. This is actually really fascinating, a history of medicine and culture. There's even some gender stuff in here - boring meat is manly, apparently.
I wish there was a button for "I want to know way more". I would read a much longer article about this.