Many museums in Japan and abroad have hosted exhibitions of food cultures. Only at the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka (commonly called "Minpaku), however, can people can get a glimpse of world food cultures in Japan. This report describes a study elucidating the locality and commonality of world food cultures based on the example of the permanent exhibition of the National Museum of Ethnology. The author collected information related to food culture for the exhibition section, considering the museum's permanent exhibition as the field, in November 2014. Three main food culture contents included food ingredients, cooking methods or utensils, and meals or dining tables. According to the author, two methods exist to read food cultures from the exhibited items: summarizing them and their component elements, and identifying each regional food culture in the history of humanity. The author divided this history into four periods for consideration: 1) the beginning of food (some ten thousands of years ago), with the formation of the base of food cultures; 2) cooking methods and dining with other people, with invention of new food culture (about ten thousand years ago); 3) development of 'food culture and food civilization' in many places worldwide (about 500-2,000 years ago) based on exhibitions of the Korean Peninsula, China, and other regions; and 4) food industrialization (about 200 years ago to the present) based on Ajinomoto Company, Cup-noodle, and Kikkoman Company.