I've always thought it was wealth. Around the world, wealthy people tended to have fairly similar diets with lots of meat (even in Asian areas, with exceptions

I've always thought it was wealth. Around the world, wealthy people tended to have fairly similar diets with lots of meat (even in Asian areas, with exceptions for Jains and others who had religious objections). It's poor regions and peoples who need spices to make food palatable. There was a cuisine lock-in around 1850-1950 where food culture solidified into a single thing [1], and if your region was poor when that happened, you end up with interesting vegetables and flavors, and if it was rich, you end up with "large hunks of meat" as your cultural foods. [1]: The reason British food has such a terrible reputation is that their cuisine solidified before widespread refrigeration was available but after urbanization, so it was built around carrying foods long distances that could survive no refrigeration- which drives you to overcooking, lots of sausages and preserved meats, etc. For most other regions the food culture represents a time before urbanization, and modern refrigeration supports that even when the population urbanized.