Culinary Diplomacy

“Culinary Diplomacy is the use of food and cuisine as instruments to create cross-cultural understanding in the hopes of improving interactions and cooperation.”

- Sam Chapple Sokol, Scholar

According to NYU Professor Fabio Parasecoli, "gastronativism" is on the rise -- a phenomenon where cultures "use food to advance ideas about who belongs to a community and who does not."

However, other NYU initiatives, such as MAKE FOOD NOT WAR, aim to combat the effects of gastronativism by providing a common ground for people across socioeconomic, cultural, and religious backgrounds to break bread together.

Our Seat at the Table believes in these initiatives and aims to promote the sharing of values, traditions, and worldviews through food.

Our Projects:

A note from Marin:

This passion started as a bored and isolated middle schooler looking for connection and a creative outlet during the pandemic. It started as cooking and fostering personal connection and belonging. Over the past few years, a little passion hobby has turned into a wide spanning initiative with programming, community, impact and a social media presence. Though Our Seat at the Table has evolved many times over the course of the past few years into its current iteration, my commitment towards it – and my dedication to providing these seats at the table – has never wavered. After October 7th, I added in a “Breaking Bread” series where I will be able to bring Israeli and Palestinian people together to “break bread”. Inspired by the concept of NYU’s “Delicious Activism” and by using the tenets of cultural diplomacy, “Breaking Bread” will create a gathering place to maintain human connection in a conflict that aims to dehumanize the “other.” If anything, the more initiatives I add to Our Seat, the more inspired I am to continue expanding our programming to reach beyond vulnerable youth in my own community to help reach vulnerable youth across the country, and hopefully, the world.

Our Seat at the Table’s shares resources and sponsors Culinary Diplomacy events. In January 2024, through a connection to filmmaker Peter Decherney at the University of Pennsylvania, we attended the Abayudaya Jewish Communities photography exhibit in LA as a collaboration of UCLA Alan D. Leve for Jewish Studies, the Penn Global Documentary Institute and Hillel at UCLA.

5 Questions We Ask at our Table:

  1. Culinary diplomacy has been defined as “the use of food and cuisine as an instrument to create cross-cultural understanding in the hopes of improving interactions and cooperation.” What does culinary diplomacy mean to you?

  2. What do you hope culinary diplomacy can do? What do you see its uses in the future?

  3. What is your favorite food and why? 

  4. As French gastronomer Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin once said, food is an important way in which nations define themselves — national cuisine is a marker by which a people self-identifies. How has your identity shaped your relationship with food? 

  5. What is the most essential piece of advice you could give to young people today about their relationship with food?