What Does the World Eat? National Dishes, Breakfasts, Regional Dishes and the Main Meal of the Day from Wikipedia and Wikidata

What does each country eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner, which dish does it hold up as its own, and which dishes belong to one region rather than the whole country? I assemble an open atlas of these questions from English Wikipedia and Wikidata. Wikipedia's list of national dishes covers 186 countries and territories; the first dish listed is most often meat or a grill (42, 23%), then a starchy staple such as a maize or cassava porridge (29), then a soup, stew or curry (27). The article on breakfast around the world describes 73 countries, which fall into eight styles; in Europe 17 of 25 countries start with bread and savoury toppings and 5 with coffee and something sweet. Wikidata places 2,706 of 8,363 foods with a country of origin (32%) in one of 485 states, provinces or regions, but coverage is very uneven: Japan, Indonesia and Italy together account for 51%. Separate lunch and dinner maps are not supported: no Wikidata food is tagged with lunch or dinner as its course, against 464 main courses. Instead I code which meal is the main meal where sources say so: midday in 34 of 49 coded countries and evening in 11. Converting stated meal times to sun time, Spain's lunch at 2 pm falls at 12:16 by the sun, and its supper only 24 minutes after Britain's evening meal. The atlas describes what the open record claims, not what people eat every day. Interactive version: https://maps.tristanhotham.com/food-map/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/food-map. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/29/food-map/.