Ed Ranks Countries by Food

Remember when I did Ed Ranks Countries by Beer? Yeah, that was awesome.  I did that before food because beer is much more important than food. But I guess you need food to survive or something, so I might as well rank that as well, huh? Sure! Why not!

10.  Lebanon

It's a little unfair to call this one just "Lebanon," but that's what I'm doing. A more accurate description would be "Levantine cuisine," referring to the food of the entire eastern Mediterranean including Lebanon, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Palestine, Syria, southern Turkey, and (arguably, to some degree) Cyprus. This is all the delicious meze and related foods you might have consumed - including (but not limited to) tabbouleh, hummus, baba ghanoush, dolma, kebabs, kibbeh, shawarma. It's all amazing.

9.  China

Cha siu bao are better than life itself.

I'm not talking about American "Chinese food," but the actual real stuff. I'm not saying that everything there is fantastic. China is a large country with geographically and ethnically diverse foods. Quite frankly, some of their food is terrible. A lot of it is amazing though. Especially dim sum. I'm salivating now just thinking about dim sum. Well, now I know what I have to do for Chinese New Year.

 8. France

French food is legendary, but to a large degree its the French methods that are famed around the world. Although to a large degree, both the food itself and the methods are inspired by the Italians (but the French probably won't admit it). Cheese, wine, French onion soup (or as they call in in France, "onion soup"), pâtisseries, coq a vin, the list goes on. Not croissants though. Croissants are Austrian. Sorry to ruin everything you thought you knew with that revelation.

 7.  Korea

Yes, I'm saying Korean food is better than French food. You got a problem with that? I'll eat a bibimbap bowl over a pot-au-feu any day of the week. Do I like kimchi? Sure! Do I want to have it with every meal while I'm in Korea? Not particularly, but they give it to me every meal anyway.
 
6.  Greece

Honestly, Greek food isn't that much different from a number of other Mediterranean cuisines. But it's good. Great seafood. Olives and/or olive oil in everything. Tasty lamb. Stuffed grape leaves. Spanakopita. Filo dough surrounding everything. So good! I'm actually not particularly in love with feta though. I mean, it's okay.

 5. Japan

Japan soars to this high from Sushi alone. As for some of the other weird crap they eat, it's best not to think about it too hard.

 4.  Thailand

Note the green plastic chair. This is street food, people. STREET FOOD!

Thai food is amazing if you like spice. Which you should, or I don't treat your food palette with any seriousness at all. Such a wide variety of amazing dishes. Like Greece - these people know how to do seafood. Tom yum, for starters. But they also do everything else really well. Even if you just pick up food from a street cart in Thailand, it will likely be better than any meal you've ever had at an Applebees. And those sauces! Hey, speaking of amazing spicy food in good sauces...

 3.  India

Indian food is incredible. I could absolutely become a vegetarian if I had to (although I don't want to) because of Indian food. I don't understand why all vegetarians just don't eat Indian food all the time. It's almost worth asking for a vegetarian meal on an airplane just because it ups your chance of getting a curry.  How do they make their food taste so amazing? Why does everyone else making vegetarian food try to make hideous tofu chicken fingers rather than just using natural spices and ingredients like they do in India? Who can go back to eating shitty creamed spinach again after having a palak paneer?

 2.  Italy

As much as I love Indian and Thai and many of those other food listed previously - if I was told I could only have one type of cuisine for the rest of my life, it would be down to these last two. Italian food just barely loses out. Hey Italian food, I'm sorry. You shouldn't take it as a loss. You're so amazing! Pizza! Pasta! Prosciutto! That amazing cheese! Mozzarella is the best cheese in the world, by far. It almost makes up for that disgusting ricotta shit that you also call "cheese." Ricotta is like real cheese that's ground into little bits and mixed with water from a washing machine after cleaning an entire load of socks from the workers of a construction site. Ricotta is really the only reason Italian food is #2.

 1. Mexico

The king of food.

As alluded to above, if I was told that I could only stick to one type of cuisine for the rest of my life and couldn't have anything else - I'd pick Mexican. And no, just like with American "Chinese" food I'm not thinking of Tex Mex. Mexican food comes from a rich mixture of Mesoamerican cuisine and traditions blended with European (especially Spanish, obviously) techniques and ingredients. It's incredible. Like many of the others I've mentioned above there are diverse regions with completely different foods and in none of those regions are there any foods called "Crunchwrap Supreme." Northern Mexico has the food most Americans and others around the world would find familiar, but you also have the amazing food of Oaxaca, Yucatan, Veracruz and so on. Corn, tomatoes, avocados, chili peppers - these things are all native to the New World and are staples of Mexican cuisines. I mean just think of something as incredible and complex as Mole sauce - and how the rest of the world took that complexity and dumbed it down into "durr, let's just add milk and sugar to this 'chocolate' ingredient until we get a sweet bar with the texture of wax." And Mexico is also the only country in the Western Hemisphere that figured out how to make amazing street food like in Asian cuisine. Who the hell needs a fast food joint like McDonalds when you can pick up tacos al pastor from a cart for, like, practically nothing. It's hard to find the real/authentic Mexican food experience outside of Mexico though - which is problematic what with the rampant beheading and all.