Ancestral Diet Explorer
Click countries on the map, or paste your DNA test results, to see what your ancestors actually ate day to day — and the common thread across all your regions.
Borders follow the Natural Earth public-domain dataset. Small countries and islands are shown as dots so they can still be selected.
Everything stays on your device. Your text and screenshot are read here in your browser and are never uploaded — this page is a static site with no server to send them to. AncestryDNA cannot export ethnicity percentages at all, so pasting or screenshotting is the only way, and it means we never touch your genetic file.
Recipes across your regions
Your regions in detail
How it works
This tool describes the traditional, pre-industrial daily diets (roughly 1600–1900) of ancestral regions worldwide. Your percentages weight how prominently each region's foods appear, and the "common thread" surfaces staples shared across your regions — because when several of your ancestral lines ate the same way, that pattern describes most of your family tree.
These are the everyday diets of ordinary people — farmers, fishers, herders — not aristocratic or restaurant cuisine. Where an iconic food arrived late (potatoes in Ireland, chili in Korea, maize in Africa), the region notes say so honestly, with dates.
This is food history, not nutrition advice. Nothing here says any of these foods is healthy or that you should eat this way.
Questions
Can I upload my AncestryDNA file?
No — and you should not need to. The file AncestryDNA lets you download contains only raw genetic markers; your ethnicity percentages are not in it and cannot be exported. Copy the text from your results page and paste it above, or drop in a screenshot. That also means this tool never touches your genetic data.
Is my screenshot uploaded anywhere?
No. It is read inside your browser by a local text-recognition engine that we host ourselves. There is no server here to receive an upload, and the image is discarded as soon as it has been read.
Where do the recipes come from?
Every region carries eight recipes for dishes it actually ate in the stated era — traceable to period cookbooks, ethnographic records, museum sources, or documented living traditions, with real quantities and honest modern substitutions. Save the ones you like with the ♡ button; they stay on this device.
Why does one country offer several regions?
Because some countries hold more than one distinct foodway — northern and southern India, or the several culinary Chinas, ate very differently. Rather than pick one for you, the map asks.