Recipes for Change
I am not a master chef. When my mom came to visit this past Thanksgiving, she was horrified by my only can opener: a cheap hand-operated one, barely functional and so rusted it probably gave her tetanus just by looking at it. (She bought me an electric can opener that arrived the next day.) For the record, I was 38 years old at the time.
But I do love food. I also love foreign policy, so I started thinking about how the two intersect. Not just at the macro level of supply chains and trade wars, but at the personal level, around the dinner table with family and friends. How things like politics, conflict, migration, and trade shape, and are in turn shaped by, the food culture and cuisine of a country or region.
To explore that idea, I decided to seek out cookbooks from around the world that intersect in some way with some aspect of geopolitics. Below are seven I found compelling. These aren’t just cookbooks with recipes for delicious food—though they certainly contain those. Rather, they’re immersive explorations of the people, cultures, and stories behind the headlines. And they’re a reminder that countries are more than just the wars they fight and the treaties they sign.
