Although culinary diplomacy can be traced to antiquity, its importance has seen exponential growth. From the South Korean "Kimchi Diplomacy" to Thailand's two-decade-long concerted program of exporting pad Thai and massaman curry worldwide. Culinary diplomacy is an important facet of behavioural economics as we share an intimate relationship with food and what cuisine occupies the top of the food chain tells us about culture, information, and diversifying our thought and food basket.
Let us get into it. Joel Waldfogel of the University of Minnesota used data from TripAdvisor and Euromonitor to estimate the world trade of cuisines for 52 countries. Trade of cuisine is the same as trade elsewhere if the cuisine is imported from somewhere else and is being consumed locally it is seen as an import, and the domestic cuisine being consumed abroad is seen as an export. An example would be eating Biryani from Lucknow in London will be seen as an export for India, but an import for the United Kingdom. The paper was published in 2019 in the journal of Cultural Economics.
The results are surprising and offer a window into globalization and other economic factors at play. The United States of America along with China, Brazil, and Britain are amongst the greatest importers. Their culinary deficit ranges from US$ 30 Billion for Britain to US$ 55 Billion for the United States. The greatest exporters of culinary wonders are to be found in Italy, Japan, Turkey, and Mexico. The imbalance though is staggering the Italians have almost a US$ 168 Billion surplus, and the next-in-line exporter is Japan but with a surplus of slightly shy of US$ 50 Billion the imbalance is in contrast. Beyond numbers, it tells an interesting story of tastes and preferences that shape the world's palate.
Why pay any heed to a purely hypothetical culinary trade war? Perhaps because more than just some numbers it offers insight and holds the key to some of the greatest challenges we face in this century from deep-seated prejudice to climate change. Let us untangle one of those before we go ahead. Prejudice. The word for acquired taste exists in just about every language that you can dream of (almost).
Our choice of food comes from our lived environments, religious strictures, and our cultural backgrounds. Food like language has the power to shape our emotional responses and imprint our memory. Food on one level is pretty mundane as just about everything we ascribe a value to it is in our heads. Yet this marks the greatest triumph of food with ourselves. Think for a moment about the brain, it is the most calorie-demanding organ in our bodies, it signals neurons to make us hungry, and will pump chemicals to ensure we salivate and remember to eat. It makes us latch on to concepts such as comfort food, and the hedonistic treadmill of delivery today, and exercise tomorrow.
Food is often the first line of stereotyping that we indulge in from time to time. Try praising Fish and Chips in Provence. Or if you feel particularly courageous try taking on Illish in any geographic location in the eastern parts of India, stretching into Bangladesh. Disgusting food is often to be found in exotic locations. Cue the jokes about deep-fried Mars bars in Scotland, or the beavers as fish classification according to the Roman Catholic Church as they found that the newly minted Christians around Quebec would not give up eating beavers during lent. Food has an interesting story to tell us about prejudices and our cultural blindspots. There has been a lot of discussion about food as soft power but they have not taken into account the changing perception of food with the rise of digital nomadism and the anarcho-tribalism of Instagram.
Food also tells the story of displacement of people and ideas. Take for example two different cuisines from Asia, the Indian cuisine (the cuisine from India is diverse but here it means the subcontinent as a whole) there is no dearth of its fans in the world. It is a reflection of the large Indian diaspora which has made it popular wherever it has settled, and after that it has grown. Even though it is spicy and has a lot of combination of spices it is not very expensive and people do not mind paying for it. The image below is a combination and node graph of various Indian condiments that go together in shaping taste. The particular success of Indian cuisine is also due to the role that colonial displacement has played.
Therefore the amazing Indonesian cuisine not being as available makes for an interesting contrast and that is where the economics, politics, and prejudice of food becomes an interesting tale. Indonesian food uses a lot of food groups with a lot of spices to render taste which is very hard to create with a few condiments and makes it expensive, therefore making its prices at par with expensive French dishes, add to the fact that Indonesian have the lowest amount of willingness to relocate outside their country of any Asian country, making the diaspora smaller for any culinary diplomacy. Though there is a huge impact that Indonesian spices and cuisine has made in Netherlands due to the latters colonial past, and has presence in parts of Africa for the same reason.
There is a lot of prejudice against the rendang, soto, and sambal due to lack of information and presence of people to popularise it. Well in this case prejudice will keep you away from a kickass meal. Perhaps food can be a better way to do away with prejudice? More tasting session for a more balanced world. Bring it on!
