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Thali

About Thali

Thali is a free guide to the food of the world. It has pages on 1,141 dishes from 187 countries so far, and 11,756 more are on the list to be written. A thali is the round plate, common across India, that holds a whole meal in small bowls: a little of everything, side by side. That is the idea here.

The aim is simple: anyone should be able to look up any food and come away knowing what it is, where it is from, what goes into it, when it is eaten and what it means to the people who make it.

How it is arranged

Every dish is filed by country and, where the sources allow, by city or region; by meal (breakfast, lunch, tea, dinner, supper, snacks); by kind; by occasion (everyday, festival, wedding, fasting, mourning); and by faith tradition where it has a place in worship. Ways of eating explains the customs around food, such as the tapas crawl or langar. The food calendar ties dishes to the days they are made for.

What is live

On the table today is rebuilt every day from the calendar: which feasts and fasts are under way, what is coming, what is in season, and a dish of the day. New dish pages are written every day, the news wire is checked every few hours, and every page is re-read against its sources over time.

How a page is made

Names and facts come from Wikidata and Wikipedia. The text is written afresh with AI assistance from those sources only: the facts are kept, the wording is ours. Every page is then compared with its source article, and a page that repeats a run of the article's words is rewritten or held back. Each page names its source and links to it and to its licence. Photos come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences, each credited to its author. Further reading links are ones the source article itself cites from well-known publishers. A page is published only if it has a confirmed country and enough to say; anything that falls short waits for a person to review it.

What Thali is not

It is not a recipe site: pages describe how a dish is made in outline and link to places that give full recipes. It is not dietary, allergy or religious guidance: cooks differ, and a dish described as vegetarian or permitted here may not be so on a given plate. Ask the cook.

Care

Food is bound up with identity, and many dishes are claimed by more than one country. Thali lists a dish under every country whose cooking it belongs to and reports disputed origins as disputed. Sacred food is described as those who keep the tradition would describe it. If a page about your food is wrong, write to us and we will fix it.

Who is behind it

Thali is published by ClearTrust, a company that measures traffic quality for the advertising industry. ClearTrust pays for Thali and keeps it free. Thali is part of the ClearTrust IVT-Free Publication Network. IVT stands for invalid traffic: visits from bots and other fakes, which the network's sites are screened for. Editorial decisions are not for sale: sponsored placements are always labelled.

Get in touch

To suggest a dish, correct a page or ask a question, write to thali@cleartrust.cc.

The weekly plate

Every Monday: seven dishes you may not know, what the world is cooking this week, and one way of eating.