~cuisines { A garden of the world's cooking traditions. Not which tastes best, but which is the deeper engine: how much technique it holds, how wide a range it can express, and how much of the rest of world cooking it seeded. Membership means "belongs in the conversation." A claim of one cuisine under another means the second subsumes the first on that axis — the contestable part, and the point of the garden. }

~chinese { Wok hei, a five-flavor grammar, and a fermentation lineage older than most written cuisines. Seeded the whole of East and Southeast Asia. }
~french { Codified the mother sauces, the brigade, the vocabulary. Most professional kitchens on earth still think in its words, whatever they cook. }
~indian { The deepest spice logic anywhere: tempering, layering, and bloom order treated as grammar rather than seasoning. Regional range wider than most continents. }
~japanese { Subtraction as technique. Dashi, cutting, aging, and the discipline of leaving an ingredient alone. }
~mexican { Nixtamalization is a genuine invention, not a variation. Chili taxonomy and moles that run to thirty ingredients without muddling. }
~italian { Radical restraint. Fewer components, ruthlessly sourced, assembled by feel. Exported further than any other European tradition. }
~thai { Balance held as an explicit target: hot, sour, salty, sweet tuned against each other in a single mouthful. }
~levantine { The mezze logic — many small dishes as one meal — plus mastery of legume, sesame, sour fruit, and open fire. }
~west-african { The stew-and-starch grammar that seeded the Caribbean, Brazil, and the American South. Rice, palm, pepper, ferment. }
~peruvian { Improbable biodiversity plus three waves of migration layered rather than blended. Potatoes and chilies in the hundreds. }

~sichuan { Mala: the numbing of huajiao played against chili heat. A whole flavor axis the rest of cooking mostly lacks. }
~cantonese { Restraint inside a maximalist tradition. Steam, freshness, and the most demanding standard for the ingredient itself. }
~kaiseki { Seasonal progression as composition. The meal has an argument and an ending. }
~oaxacan { Seven moles, mezcal, and the densest concentration of pre-Columbian technique still practiced daily. }
~tamil { Rice, lentil, tamarind, curry leaf. The oldest continuous vegetarian haute tradition in the world. }
~sicilian { Where the Arab pantry meets Italian restraint — saffron, pine nut, raisin, citrus, sardine. }
~nikkei { Japanese knife and fish discipline applied to Peruvian acid and chili. A real hybrid, not a fusion menu. }

{ Chinese belongs in the top rank of mother cuisines: breadth, age, and downstream influence all maximal. }
~chinese <: ~cuisines

{ French earns its place on codification alone — it gave the world the vocabulary. }
~french <: ~cuisines

{ Indian belongs for spice logic no other tradition matches in depth. }
~indian <: ~cuisines

{ Japanese belongs for a technique of subtraction nobody else developed as far. }
~japanese <: ~cuisines

{ Mexican belongs on the strength of nixtamalization and mole. }
~mexican <: ~cuisines

{ Italian belongs for restraint and reach. }
~italian <: ~cuisines

{ Thai belongs for treating balance as an explicit, teachable target. }
~thai <: ~cuisines

{ Levantine belongs for the mezze structure and its pantry. }
~levantine <: ~cuisines

{ West African belongs, and is the most under-credited: much of Atlantic-world cooking descends from it. }
~west-african <: ~cuisines

{ Peruvian belongs for biodiversity and a genuine layering of migrations. }
~peruvian <: ~cuisines

{ Sichuan is a regional tradition inside the Chinese culinary world. }
~sichuan <: ~chinese

{ Cantonese is the Chinese tradition's other pole — the same pantry, the opposite temperament. }
~cantonese <: ~chinese

{ Kaiseki is the formal, composed end of Japanese cooking. }
~kaiseki <: ~japanese

{ Oaxaca is Mexico's deepest regional reservoir. }
~oaxacan <: ~mexican

{ Tamil cooking is a regional tradition within the Indian culinary world. }
~tamil <: ~indian

{ Sicily is Italian by geography and Arab by pantry. The containment holds but strains. }
~sicilian <: ~italian

{ Nikkei is genuinely dual-parented: Japanese method, Peruvian ingredient. Containment here is not a tree. }
~nikkei <: ~japanese

{ And equally Peruvian — the fish, the aji, the lime, the country it was invented in. }
~nikkei <: ~peruvian

{ Contestable, and offered as such: the wok, the noodle, the stir-fry and the soy came south with Chinese migration. Thai balance is its own achievement, but the engine underneath it is Chinese. }
~thai <: ~chinese

{ Also contestable: chopsticks, soy, tea, tofu, noodles and the character for every one of them crossed from the mainland. Japan refined further than anyone but did not found. }
~japanese <: ~chinese

{ The hardest one. French codified what Italy had been practicing for two centuries; on the axis of transmissible technique, French subsumes it. Expect this to be voted down. }
~italian <: ~french

{ Rejecting the colonial framing outright. West African cooking is not a rustic branch of European technique — the debt runs the other direction across the whole Atlantic world. }
~west-african !<: ~french