- Pad thai was a government creation in the 1930s as a solution to a rice shortage.
- It was also positioned as Thailand's national dish to help strengthen the country's identity.
Walk into a Thai restaurant in any country, and chances are you'll find pad thai on the menu.
The ubiquitous dish — stir-fried rice noodles studded with peanuts, egg, bean sprouts, and meat or tofu — has become a cultural mainstay of Thai cuisine. Even its name simply means "Thai stir-fry," giving it the sense that it's a classic dish that's been around for ages.
But pad thai isn't actually a dish with a winding, thousand-year history. Rather, it's a relatively new addition to Thai cuisine, with roots in the 1930s amid a rice shortage and a push for nationalism.
Noodles for nation-building
In the 1930s, Siam, as Thailand was then called, faced an agricultural and economic crisis. Following the Great Depression, the price of rice — a key export for the country — fell precipitously by two-thirds from 1930 to 1932. A rice shortage caused by flooding and limited production only exacerbated the problem.
People turned against the monarchy. In 1932, an army officer called Plaek Phibunsongkhram, who founded the radical People's Party five years earlier, helped lead a coup against the Siam monarchy. Phibun, as the officer was called, took power as dictator in 1938. One year later, he changed the country's name to Thailand as a sign of modernizing the region.
To address the economic crisis, the Thai government under Phibun promoted the consumption of rice noodles, which use less grain than a bowl of rice.
Pad thai was not just a solution to an agricultural crisis. Phibun sought to strengthen Thailand and its global image, and so mandated the creation of a national dish.
According to some accounts, the government held a competition to determine a national noodle dish. Others claim that Phibun picked pad thai because it was his favorite version of a noodle his housekeeper made.
Pad thai was promoted across Thailand under the slogan "noodle is your lunch," telling residents that consuming pad thai was a patriotic act that helped with the war effort. Promoting pad thai was a part of a larger nation-building propaganda campaign that hoped to strengthen Thai culture globally and cement Phibun's status as leader.
The government's push to make pad thai global
From Thailand, pad thai entered the international food scene via gastrodiplomacy, which is when a country uses food as a way to gain global influence.
In 2002, the Thai government pushed a campaign to increase the number of Thai restaurants around the world. Through the "Global Thai" program, the government offered loans to Thai nationals who wanted to open restaurants abroad and arranged meetings between Thai and foreign business people.
The campaign was a success. The number of Thai restaurants abroad went from 5,500 at the time of the program's launch to more than 15,000 as of 2018, Vice reported.
Other countries like South Korea, Taiwan, and Peru have since followed suit, establishing their own initiatives to expand their global culinary footprint.