While I can't say why others voted it up to the top page I will say that I did find this interesting. From the guidelines: "Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in finding the origins of popular things/products/services interesting - and in this case, it's about the origins of a pretty common and national dish as a result of an odd series of ethnic and economic events. More broadly you could say it also speaks a bit to how and why ideas spread.