[boca_honey]

I'm sorry to repeat myself but this bothers me because this is my specialization.

There are less than 7 thousand ingredients [1]. Even if you think it's way more than that on account of underrepresented cultures (which does not seem to be the case in this particular study), it's still just a few thousand. Most cuisines use around 50 of them.

[1] https://flowingdata.com/2018/09/18/cuisine-ingredients/

The total number of cooking techniques should be in the hundreds (not thousands), to be generous, even accounting for historical / prehistorical techniques.

So yeah, this checks out.

[blovescoffee]

I suppose it depends on what you count as an ingredient, even still it's greater than 7 thousand. I'm not sure what you mean by it's "your specialization" so I'm happy to hear what you could elaborate on, but I'm a bit stumped. Almost any given state in southern Mexico or any of the tropical latin American countries has thousands of ingredients from native herbs, leafy greens, chiles, spices, bugs, sea life, mammals, snakes and lizards, birds, ferments, mushrooms and fungus, tree barks, seeds, milks, any number of vegetables and fruits. Even an animal has non "meat" ingredients like blood, rennet and bile, bone marrow, do you count brains and intestines and offal here? I can't imagine where you're getting this less than 7 thousand number nor your confidence about it to be honest.