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Concordia Winter 2022

gastrodiplomacy is all about. Fortnum & Mason ran the competition and the winning pudding, announced in a special BBC documentary back in May, was revealed as a lemon Swiss roll trifle. It was served up not only at street parties around the country and British embassies around the world, but in our very own Merchant Taylors’ Hall for the Company’s Livery Dinner too. My other gastrodiplomacy project has been authoring the official Platinum Jubilee Cookbook which came out in April. It has seventy recipes from British diplomatic missions (seventy being a nod to the late Queen’s 70 years on the throne) along with diplomatic dinner party anecdotes which I unearthed from the Foreign Office archives. It is also full of profiles of great British food and drink products – many of them Royal Warrant holders – that fly the flag for our best loved British produce. I was particularly honoured that Their Majesties The King and The Queen Consort chose to write a joint foreword to the book. For the first time, it tells the story of diplomacy through food and drink. I hope it helps to remind us all that, in diplomacy as much as in other parts of life, food can be a great bringer-together. And, especially in light of Her Majesty’s passing since the book was published, I hope above all it acts as a tribute to our wonderful late Queen. For as I say in the book’s dedication, she was our greatest diplomat. The Platinum Jubilee Cookbook ISBN 9780993354069 is published by Bloomsbury and is available online and in all good bookstores. OMTs can purchase the book for 40% off the recommended retail price through https://www.bloomsbury. com/uk/platinum-jubilee cookbook-9780993354069/ using the code FCDOUK40 100% of royalties from sales go to charity, split equally between The Queen’s Commonwealth Trust and the Prince of Wales’s Charitable Fund.

understand their culture, what better – and more enjoyable – way of doing so than by eating their food? Gastrodiplomacy is about recognising this insight and harnessing the power of food and drink as a tool of diplomacy; as a source of ‘soft power’, and to help to win hearts and minds through people’s stomachs. This is partly about promoting around the world all that is great about Britain. Once somewhat sneered at, British food and drink – everything from Welsh lamb and Northern Irish beef, to Scottish salmon and English sparkling wine – is now internationally admired, and our embassies showcasing it helps to boost British exports and create jobs here at home. But gastrodiplomacy is also about smoothing the fundamental business of international negotiation: entertainment in embassies and at Ambassadors’ Residences is an important part of what diplomats do. Done cleverly, it helps unlock progress on important foreign policy issues for, so often, to get to the negotiating table diplomats go via the dinner table. Ambassadors say that when they’re conducting hard-nosed negotiations about knotty issues, sharing a meal with the negotiating partner can help hugely to build a rapport and arrive at a productive outcome. As a famous former French ambassador, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, once said “give me a good chef and I’ll give you good treaties.” It was this idea of food and its function as a diplomatic tool that led ultimately to my two culinary diplomacy projects in celebration of Her late Majesty’s Platinum Jubilee. The Platinum Pudding Competition which I co-founded was a nationwide contest, judged by a panel including Dame Mary Berry and the Head Chef of Buckingham Palace, to unearth a new dessert as a tribute to The Queen. There are countless dishes throughout history invented in honour of the rich and famous, including royalty (most famously the Victoria Sponge) and so the idea occurred to me that we needed a new pudding in celebration of our Queen. British baking format shows like Great British Bake Off are also now British cultural exports known around the world, and so it was an opportunity to not just bring the country together after the difficult Covid period, but also to celebrate a part of British heritage in the process. That is what

Mention ‘food’ and ‘diplomacy’ to someone and their first thought may well be Ferrero Rocher. Since the infamous adverts of the chocolate being served at an Ambassador’s cocktail party appeared in the 1990s they have come to symbolise for many the world of diplomatic dining. In truth, the cliché doesn’t bear much resemblance to reality, but it is certainly true that food and drink have always occupied a central place in the world of diplomacy. In fact, former Prime Minister Lord Palmerston once declared that “dining is the soul of diplomacy”. This aspect to diplomacy – the fine dining and official entertainment – can now be seen as rather old-fashioned. Diplomats today, unlike our predecessors, are no longer supplied with the booklet issued in 1965 entitled Diplomatic Etiquette and Other Relevant Matters for Diplomatic Service and other Officers and Wives, which gave a comprehensive grounding in dinner party table placement, ceremonial toasts and everything in between. Yet entertainment, which invariably means food and drink in some form, continues to occupy a central place in the diplomat’s job, even if some of the formalities are now rather rarer. And, in recent years, there has been something of a revival of interest in, and renewed appreciation of, the role that food can play in furthering diplomatic aims. ‘Gastrodiplomacy’, as I like to call it, is alive and kicking. As Hillary Clinton said in a speech to mark the launch of the US State Department’s new ‘Chef Corps’ in 2012, “food is the oldest diplomatic tool”. The importance of food to diplomacy does not end with formal entertainment. Food is at the heart of every culture around the world. It is a prism through which to understand other societies. As Brillat-Savarin famously put it: “tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are”. If the job of a diplomat is to get under the skin of foreign societies, to

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