I had a hard time deciding on a topic, but I think I’ve finally decided to focus on Thai food. At first I wasn’t sure what I wanted to look into specifically, but after my initial research, I am going to focus on all the different cultural impacts on Thai food. I started by researching the general history Thai food and learned that China has been more impactful than any other country or region. My favorite Thai dish is chicken pad thai, so I started researching the history of this dish. From an article titled “A Brief History of Delicious Pad Thai”, I was able to find out that pad thai was originally created to help separate Thai and Chinese cultures from each other. At that time, the leader of Thailand wanted to help separate the two cultures and thought that creating a national dish of Thailand would help accomplish this. Sure enough, that dish was pad thai. I want to do some more research on why this leader thought creating a national dish would be an effective way to separate the two cultures and if food was really this important to him. I am curious to find out if the people of Thailand also saw food as an effective way to establish their own identity. I am also looking at how the different regions of Thailand each have been impacted by different cultures and therefore have very different foods/traditions than each other. I have yet to look at this in much detail but am excited to learn about the wide variety of cultural impacts on each of the four regions.