Throughout 2025, the World Tribune will feature on the cover historical acts of cultural diplomacy that shifted public sentiment and even thawed tensions between nations.
The next time you order Pad Thai from your favorite takeout restaurant, know that you’re taking part in one of the world’s best examples of culinary, or gastro, diplomacy.
The Thai government in 2002 created the Global Thai program, a diplomatic aim to increase the country’s visibility, promote tourism and even strengthen international understanding through its food.
The government provided millions in loans to Thai nationals to open restaurants around the world, providing training and standards for what constituted traditional Thai cuisine, even naming Pad Thai as its national dish. Entrepreneurs responded to such a degree that the U.S. is now home to some 10,000 Thai restaurants, even though Thai Americans compose 0.09% of the population, according to 2020 U.S. Census records.
Since the program’s introduction, governments around the world have used food as an instrument to create cross-cultural understanding and cooperation between people and nations.
The U.S. launched its “Culinary Diplomacy Partnership Initiative” in 2012, naming some 80 influential chefs to the U.S. Chef Corps, including both the former White House executive and pastry chefs, and celebrity chef Jose Andres.
The program sends Chef Corps members abroad to take part in events and programs on behalf of the U.S. State Department that are designed to foster cross-cultural exchange.
Today, gastrodiplomacy is considered a subdiscipline of cultural diplomacy, with courses taught at universities worldwide.
In his Sept. 26, 1991, address at Harvard University, titled “The Age of Soft Power,” Ikeda Sensei proposed that the hard power of military might, political authority and wealth would slowly give way to “soft power,” which is based on knowledge and information, culture, ideas and systems.
He proposed at the time that self-motivation is what would open the way to the era of soft power: “While systems depending on hard power have succeeded by using established tools of coercion to move people toward certain goals, the success of soft power is based on volition. It is an internally generated energy of will created through consensus and understanding among people. The processes of soft power unleash the inner energies of the individual. (My Dear Friends in America, fourth edition, p. 27)
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