Context

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.

What I did

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 angle

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.

Takeaways

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.