France has spent centuries turning its cuisine into more than culture — into influence. From UNESCO heritage status to state dinners to a festival staged in 150 countries, food is one of its most deliberate diplomatic tools. I set out to analyse how that works, and what it costs.

The idea had been with me for years. I first wanted to write about French gastrodiplomacy as a Terminale student at the French lycée, in a Geopolitics unit on heritage — but the project went elsewhere, and the subject stayed with me. I finally wrote it during my degree, then rebuilt it in English and updated it with current examples — Talleyrand at the Congress of Vienna, De Gaulle hosting Kennedy at Versailles, the Goût de France festival, the cabinet post of Ambassador for Gastronomy — and laid it out as a magazine feature.

The essay reads soft power through a single, concrete instrument: the meal. It takes the strategy seriously — the table really does soften a negotiation — but doesn't stop at admiration. Its sharper argument is about the cost: as France exports its cuisine as a luxury brand, it risks abandoning the local producers the whole tradition rests on. Reading a cultural symbol for what it reveals about power, and who it leaves out, is the instinct behind everything in this section.

This is where my two degrees meet most directly — cultural analysis with the tools of international relations. Taking something as ordinary as dinner and reading it as statecraft is the same move I make across my work: find the larger story inside the specific thing, and follow it to who benefits and who doesn't. That it began in a lycée Geopolitics class and ended as a piece I chose to write on my own says something about how I work: the subjects I care about don't go away.