Gastrodiplomacy: Why Food Is One of the Most Persuasive Forms of Soft Power
Gastrodiplomacy sounds like one of those words invented by people who enjoy policy briefings a bit too much. Unfortunately for the rest of us, it is also real. Countries do use food to shape how they are seen, and it works for reasons that are far more psychological than culinary.
When people talk about soft power, they usually reach for the same examples. Film. Music. Fashion. Universities. Prestige television, if they want to sound current. Cuisine gets mentioned too, though often as a decorative extra, as if food were just a charming side note to the serious business of national influence.
That undersells it badly.
Food is one of the most psychologically effective ways a country can make itself feel attractive, familiar, civilised, desirable, or simply human. Before people know a nation’s foreign policy aims or constitutional structure, they may already know its coffee, bread, dumplings, spice profile, or the one dish their local restaurant insists on describing as “authentic”. By the time politics arrives, something softer has usually got there first. A mood. A taste. A sense that this place feels good.
That is the real terrain of gastrodiplomacy. Not food as a bit of branding, but food as a shortcut into affinity.
What Gastrodiplomacy Actually Means
Gastrodiplomacy refers to the strategic use of national cuisine as a tool of public diplomacy and image-making. Over the past two decades, it has become a recognised area of diplomatic research, with scholars tracing how states use cuisine to support tourism, trade, national branding, and wider soft power goals. Thailand’s “Global Thai” programme is one of the best-known examples, and later cases have included countries such as Peru, South Korea, and Italy.
So yes, it is a real thing. Slightly irritating word, real thing.
To see why it works, it helps to start with soft power itself. Joseph Nye’s classic definition is the ability to get preferred outcomes through attraction and persuasion rather than coercion or payment. In plainer English, soft power is what happens when people are drawn toward you rather than forced, bribed, or bullied into alignment. Culture matters here because it shapes what feels admirable, legitimate, modern, trustworthy, or worth imitating.
Food fits this almost too well.
Most political messaging arrives obviously trying to persuade. Food is slipperier. It enters through pleasure, ritual, hospitality, memory, and sensory experience. It does not usually present itself as persuasion at all. It arrives as generosity, atmosphere, heritage, warmth, craft, or curiosity. A shared meal does not feel like an argument, but it can alter the emotional setting in which later arguments are heard.
Why Food Works So Well
The first advantage is simple. Food lowers defences by not looking like a defence-lowering tool.
The second is that food is social in a way many other cultural exports are not. Research on commensality, the gloriously unappetising academic term for eating together, treats shared meals as more than calorie intake with chairs. Eating together reflects and reinforces relationships. It creates small moments of coordination, mutual recognition, and temporary belonging. Trust is often built less through abstract agreement than through repeated signs of ordinary human ease.
That is one reason official dinners and culinary diplomacy are not just ceremonial fluff. Nobody has ever solved a major geopolitical conflict because the aubergine was excellent, but shared food can soften atmospheres, create openings, and establish a tone of civil contact. Outside formal diplomacy, cuisines encountered through restaurants, migration, tourism, and media can do something similar on a quieter scale. People rarely announce that repeated positive exposure has made another culture feel more familiar. They just start feeling that a country seems inviting, stylish, comforting, or alive.
Psychology is full of patterns like this. Familiarity often increases liking. Pleasant experiences spill over into broader judgments. Symbols attach themselves to identities. Human beings are not neatly divided into separate boxes where taste stays in one corner and political feeling in another. The boxes leak.
Food and National Identity
Food also works because identity is not just something people think. It is something they live and perform. Nations are imagined communities, yes, but they are also tasted ones. People do not learn national identity only through flags, constitutions, and official myths. They learn it through festivals, kitchens, family recipes, markets, lunchboxes, restaurant menus, and endless arguments about what counts as the authentic version of a dish.
This is why scholarship on food and nationalism is so useful here. Cuisine is tied up with heritage, belonging, status, authenticity claims, and the emotional work of nationhood. Food does not merely reflect identity. It helps organise it.
That means gastrodiplomacy often works in two directions at once. Outwardly, it offers a country to foreigners in edible form. Inwardly, it helps the country narrate itself to itself. Which dishes get elevated? Which become exportable symbols? Which regions get folded into the national brand, and which are quietly left out because they are less marketable? These are not neutral choices. They are decisions about who gets to stand for the nation.
The Pleasant Story and the Less Pleasant One
Food can humanise, but it can also sanitise.
Gastrodiplomacy often turns a country into an attractive sensory experience. That sounds harmless until you remember that national image is rarely innocent. A state may be politically harsh, economically unequal, or socially exclusionary while still being very good at exporting symbols of warmth, charm, and authenticity. The cuisine says handmade, generous, rooted, welcoming. It does not say labour exploitation, democratic erosion, ethnic hierarchy, or historical violence. Food can make a country feel lovable in ways that are emotionally real and politically selective.
That is not unique to cuisine. All soft power involves some degree of polishing. Film, tourism, heritage branding, and educational prestige all tidy things up. Food has a special advantage because it is intimate. You ingest it. It enters the body under the sign of pleasure and trust. If propaganda is often too loud, cuisine works because it barely sounds like propaganda at all.
That is why gastrodiplomacy is better understood as affective statecraft than simple promotion. It shapes mood more than opinion. It builds atmosphere more than argument. A person may know almost nothing about a country and still feel positively toward it because they associate it with flavours, hospitality, beauty, or memories that have settled over time.
There is something mildly sinister in that.
Not because food is evil. Let us keep our dignity and avoid becoming unbearable about soup. The point is that modern influence rarely works by kicking the door in and introducing itself as influence. It works by becoming part of ordinary life. It enters through taste, leisure, habit, aspiration, and familiarity. Food is almost perfectly built for that.
When Dinner Starts Doing Political Work
Thailand is often treated as the textbook case because its efforts to expand Thai restaurants abroad were not simply about sharing cuisine for the love of it. The state recognised that restaurant proliferation could shape how Thailand was perceived globally while also supporting tourism and exports. More broadly, gastrodiplomacy research now describes a range of national efforts built on the same underlying idea: cuisine can bridge image-making and emotional connection.
What makes food especially effective is that it brings several psychological levers together at once. It is sensory, so it is vivid. It is social, so it is bonding. It is repeated, so it becomes familiar and symbolic enough to carry identity. Food is also pleasurable, so in turn produces a positive affect and ordinary enough not to trigger the same scepticism as overt persuasion.
That is a ridiculous amount of influence packed into lunch.
At the same time, reducing all of this to cynical manipulation would be too easy. Shared meals really can reduce distance. Culinary exchange can create curiosity where there was ignorance and warmth where there was suspicion. Food can make another culture feel less abstract and less flattened into headlines. In that sense, gastrodiplomacy works partly because it draws on something real. Even the strategic version depends on the basic social fact that people often become more open to one another when they eat together.
Simply put
Once you start noticing how often states, brands, and institutions shape people through feeling rather than direct persuasion, a lot of modern life starts to look different. Many of the most effective forms of power are not loud or explicit. They are ambient, pleasurable, and apparently self-chosen. They make a judgment feel natural rather than cultivated.
Food belongs in that category beautifully.
A country does not need you to read its policy papers. It would be perfectly happy if you booked a holiday, bought the cookbook, romanticised the capital city, followed the travel creator, told your friends the culture felt rich and warm, and developed a low-level fondness that made everything else easier to hear. By the time formal politics enters the room, the emotional weather may already have changed.
That is soft power at its most elegant. No shouting. No obvious pressure. Just attraction, repetition, memory, and taste doing their quiet work in the background.
Gastrodiplomacy tells us something larger than the fact that nations like being associated with good food. It shows how often political feeling begins before political analysis does. We like to imagine our attitudes are built from reasoned positions and conscious principles. Some of them are. Quite a few are also built from atmosphere, pleasure, familiarity, and the things that feel civilised, safe, or appealing before any formal judgment begins.
Sometimes geopolitics arrives disguised as dinner.
And dinner, rather unhelpfully, is very good at getting invited in.
References
Cabral, Ó., Sampaio, H., & Seabra, C. (2025). Power for dinner: Culinary diplomacy and geopolitical influence in a changing world. Frontiers in Political Science. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/political-science/articles/10.3389/fpos.2025.1669350/full
De Backer, C. J. S., Fischler, C., & Hudders, L. (2015). “Our” food versus “my” food. Investigating the relation between childhood socialization, prosocial behavior, and sharing food in a specific cultural context. Appetite, 86, 54-62. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0195666314004656
Ichijo, A. (2020). Food and nationalism: Gastronationalism revisited. Nationalities Papers, 48(2), 215-223. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/nationalities-papers/article/food-and-nationalism-gastronationalism-revisited/F40514544E1557B5A2BCE4630F7D819E
Li, G., & Mok, K. (2025). More than two decades of gastrodiplomacy: A review of the concept, current characteristics, and future trends. Frontiers in Political Science. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/political-science/articles/10.3389/fpos.2025.1659162/full
Marovelli, B. (2019). Food sharing initiatives as collective spaces of encounter. Geoforum, 99, 190-201. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016718518302653
Sobal, J., & Nelson, M. K. (2003). Commensal eating patterns: A community study. Appetite, 41(2), 181-190. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0195666303000783
van der Heijden, A., et al. (2025). Interaction as the foundation for eating practices in shared mealtimes. Appetite. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019566632400388X
Table of Contents
