外刊阅读20240108｜餐桌上的美食外交

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People have connected over food and used meals for political ends for centuries. There are good reasons for this. Historically, the dining table has been considered a neutral space where weapons are put aside, frank conversations held, consensus built, and agreements brokered. Egyptian pharaohs, Greek and Roman leaders, Chinese emperors and Russian czars used the lure of food to expand their reach. Jackie Kennedy drew inspiration for her soirees from those of Louis XIV of France. And food-savvy presidents such as Thomas Jefferson, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and Barack Obama used dinners to touch political bases, gather information and promote their agendas.

Today, the term “culinary diplomacy” is used to describe how global leaders use state dinners and other official meals to communicate in a more personal way. And “gastrodiplomacy” describes the way nations are using their cuisines to market themselves to foreign nations, and promote trade and tourism. Both approaches further soft-power statecraft, as opposed to hard military power, and both have proved to be effective tools of persuasion.

Yet in this time of sharp partisan divisions at home and spiraling violence abroad, people are forgetting, or ignoring, those fundamental lessons of history. The number of connections and deals made over lunch in the Senate Dining Room or at Washington cocktail parties has waned; critics have questioned the value of traditional state dinners in the 21st century; and gastrodiplomacy has been attacked as wasteful and soft. But such caviling flies in the face of history, common sense and even human biology. The detractors have lost sight of a basic fact: Everyone has to eat.

At our deepest level, we are “biologically engineered for human interaction,” said Robin Dunbar, an emeritus professor of evolutionary psychology at Oxford University. And we seem to need to eat together, even when we don’t agree with one another. We don’t know why this is so, Dr. Dunbar said, but his theory is that communal eating stimulates endorphins, our bodies’ naturally occurring opioids that reinforce good behaviors. 

To remove such a proven tool from our diplomatic kit would be self-defeating. Food is more than sustenance: It is identity, history, a universal language. State dinners and the American Culinary Corps burnish America’s profile, national security and foreign policy. They are good investments but perhaps most important, such initiatives encourage leaders and citizens to get to know one another as individual humans, rather than as cardboard symbols.

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