The World & His Tuk Tuk

Visitors to Thailand leave with many memories: massages with happy endings, over-zealous tuk-tuk drivers and Red Bull-laced vodka beach buckets among them. The one memory everyone who has set foot on Thai soil almost certainly shares, though, is of amazing food. Far from the meagre offering of green and red curries in the west, those who have been here know of the unmatchable flavours; of hot, sweet, sour and salty. From fiery somtum papaya salads from the north-eastern Isaan region, packed with chillies and lime juice, to rich, slow-cooked khao mok gai Thai-style biryani in the south; if Thais know how to do anything, it is food.

It is true that dishes from different parts of the country betray aspects of those regions’ identities. Malay and Indian influence, plain to see in the rich curries of the south, is evidence of the route of the spice trade, before which even chillies were not a commonplace feature in Thai cooking – unthinkable today. Likewise, in the northeast, similarities with Laotian cuisine reflect links between Thailand and its next-door neighbour. Indeed the ubiquitous nature of a dish like somtum, and its explosion across the country as perhaps the national dish, tells the story of the migration of the north-eastern people to Bangkok and beyond in search of work, taking food with them.

All the same, perhaps this view is too close-up. Maybe the real cultural clues given away by Thai cuisine are less in the dishes themselves, and more in this nation’s sheer obsession with food. Anyone who has experienced Thailand will be hard pressed not to tell you about the raw passion that oozes from Bangkok’s streets. Where in the west we think about having three meals a day, Thais continually graze, eating five or more times. ‘Have you eaten yet?’ is no more bizarre a greeting than a simple ‘hello’. It is perfectly possibly to have entire conversations about the intricacies of your last meal. Some foodies claim to live to eat; here is a whole country that does.