Sometimes you can take a bite of something, and that bite can take you half a world away,

or straight into the past, or even bring you right back home.

When I so much as smell dolomadas stuffed cabbage, I am immediately in my grandmother's kitchen in Greece,

and in a place and with a person, I can no longer go see. Food is cultural heritage.

When I're in noodles, I feel like that's love. That's love from my parents. Because, you know,

my dad is a noodle-holic. So, yeah, who is noodles for lunch almost every day throughout the year.

He believes that all the other foods including rice, bread, and even burger, are snacks compared to noodles.

So that's something that has been passed down to us.

That's one of our listeners, Ji Wei Guo.

She's from the Shanxi province of China, but living in Scotland.

Shanxi is known for its noodles, so noodles bring her home.

Sometimes we turn to food to give us a lens into other people's cultural heritage, to learn about their home.

One of our guests this week became the first Western student at a culinary school in Chengdu,

China, and she's been spreading the word about Chinese cuisine in the West ever since.

I was in a class full of 50 mainly Sichuanese young men and two other women,

and all the classes were taught in such one dialect.

And all our textbooks were in Chinese.

This is F.T. Weekend, the podcast.

I'm Lila at Raptopoulos.

This weekend, we explore the food that

gives places their identities. We're going to Shanshi, the noodle capital of China, with

Giewe and my colleague, the food writer Fisha Dunlop. But before we go, these conversations

...