Japan
Japanese pantry
Japanese food and cooking evolved influenced mostly by the country's particular geography. Meat does not make a large contribution to Japan's culinary history; fish, seaweed, rice, and soy do.
Related topics
A brief history of pasta
Where you place the origins of pasta depends a great deal on how you define it. There is evidence that the ancient Etruscans prepared a wheat and egg paste, but it was baked not boiled. Does that count? There are artifacts from a period 3,000 years ago that look remarkably like pasta dies and extruders. But naturally the material they worked on is not preserved.