I have two questions on the following sentence:
Have you ever been in a foreign country for half year without eating western food?
Q1: Do I need to capitalize Western ?
Q2: Assume the writer is Asian, and he used "western food".
Could you understand the phrase "western food" in the first place? If not, how would a native speaker write it?
Best Answer
Western capitalised refers to a particular part of the world—the West/The Western world/the Occident which isn't defined to unanimous satisfaction, but more or less means Europe and those former European colonies with a majority European population—or else the western part of a particular area that can be deduced from context. Without capitals, western just means it relates to the direction west generally.
Therefore capitalised it would mean food from that place.
Capitalised and coming after a discussion about how Western Europe differed from Eastern Europe in terms of cuisine, we'd re-adjust our contextual assumptions, and assume it meant Western European.
Not capitalised, it could be taken to mean "food from somewhere vaguely west of here", but that really, unless context gave someone a good reason to assume it did mean exactly that, it'd be taken to mean the same as Western.