Belle Taylor.

that while the majority of chefs in restaurant kitchens are men, at home the cooking is almost exclusively the domain of women.

“The women I met along the way live very traditional lives,” Lin-Liu says. “It definitely changed my idea of cooking in general … a lot of women don’t like it because it’s an obligation.”

Lin-Liu finds herself unsettled by the limited lives led by many of the women she meets on her journey, and how many are bound to their roles of wife and mother.

“I was beginning to realize that ‘traditional’ was a word I liked when applied to food but not so much when it was associated with women. And could you have one without the other?” Lin-Liu writes. “Like many other young women I’d met on my journey, including Nur’s sister and Yasmin in Iran, Daniela associated cooking, pasta-making and baking with being held back, being rooted in old ways.”

While her journey began as a mission to discover the origins of noodles, LinLiu realizes that the food people eat in different places evolves over time and is influenced by a wide variety of factors. The stories and traditions that spring up around food are a complex blend of myth and fact.

“That was what the trip was about — importance of friends and family, of slowing down enough to enjoy life,” LinLiu writes. “Searching for the origins of noodles had allowed me to come to those realizations.”

Lin- Liu is now based in Chengdu, where she lives with her husband and daughter who was conceived in Italy — the final destination on the noodle road. Contact the writer at belletaylor@chinadaily.com.cn.