After starting my personal challenge of cooking meals from every country in the world, I started realizing that splitting up cuisines by country sometimes misses out on some larger and more meaningful patterns. An example would be Levantine cuisine. The Levant is a historical geographical pointer to countries in the Eastern Mediterranean part of Western Asia; Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, parts of Turkey, sometimes stretching to include parts of Egypt and Libya. An important common denominator of their respective cuisines is meze, with dishes including tabbouleh, hummus, and baba ghanoush. I cooked ful medames once and put it under my Palestine tab, but it is actually cooked across the region, including Egypt, with which I found it first associated. And there are many more such examples! So instead, I think I should make an effort to classify cuisines on a more content-aware basis.

There are some very interesting Wikipedia articles related to food, cuisines, and history.

The Wikimedia cookbook nicely groups cuisines by region in the following ten categories.

However, this categorization seems to lack a place for Central Asian cuisines including Kazakh, Tajik, Uzbek, and others. Furthermore, though Mediterranean is quite a distinct style, it feels superfluous in my categorization. Might be better to replace it with Central Asian instead, thereby covering practically every part of the world in our ten regions.