Hello, I'm Lale Aricoglu, and welcome to a food-packed episode of women who travel.

Today we're asking, what defines a national dish?

Who decides? Is it tradition? Is it the people who grow the ingredients?

Or is it governments or ad agencies?

A little later, I'll be chatting to Mallory Santucci,

culinary producer for Condé N Naz's Bon Appetit,

about how they approach the idea across the magazine's pages and in their test kitchen.

I feel like oftentimes, if you talk about a national dish or food in general,

I feel like it gets tricky because food culture doesn't necessarily abide by borders all the time.

In National Dish, I ended up choosing six countries, which I knew well myself and where the

cuisines were really fascinating and were a fascinating story.

First, Annie von Bremsen, an author of six cookbooks, her newest work, National Dish, is a blend of memoir, history and culinary travelogue.

I look at this very traditional French dish, Pot-A-Foe, Pot-in-A-Fire, which is a boiled dinner.

Then I moved to Naples to research pizza and pasta.

I go to Tokyo and spend a month there researching ramen and I'm also researching

rice, which is a cornerstone of like the national identity, national diet. I go to Spain to

Seville for tapas and then to Oaxaca for molle and tortillas. Italy, France, Spain, Mexico, Japan and Turkey, where she eats in bars, fancy restaurants,

and from a host of food carts to try and understand what forms each place's national dish.

The whole point of my book is to deconstruct the idea of a national cuisine and to see how it came about and how recent it is.

And national dishes can become symbols of nationalism, of power.

There's a lot of money.

The countries put into promoting these dishes.

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