According to Mark Padoongpatt, Pad Thai was created during what national project?

According to Mark Padoongpatt, Pad Thai was created during Thailand’s nation-building project.

In this interpretation, the dish belonged to a wider effort to turn a diverse kingdom into a more unified modern nation. Food was not merely private nourishment: it could communicate what citizens supposedly shared, including language, taste, customs, and loyalty to the nation.

The political setting was the rule of Plaek Phibunsongkhram, whose government promoted cultural and economic changes in the late 1930s and during World War II. The state encouraged rice noodles partly in response to wartime and flood-related rice shortages, while also associating the dish with a modern Thai identity. The name “Pad Thai” made that symbolism especially direct.

Nation-building is not the same as colonization, industrialization, or urban renewal. Those terms describe other kinds of state transformation, but Padoongpatt’s point concerns the deliberate construction of a shared national culture. The dish’s Chinese-influenced noodle ancestry does not contradict that story; nation-building often works by recasting older ingredients and practices as national symbols.