Culinary diplomat showcases American food around the globe.
By J.J. Harder (’00, ’06)
U.S. Foreign Service Officer
(The views expressed here are his own)
Is there a nation prouder than the U.S.? We’re proud of our national parks, our sports teams, our road trips. We’re proud of our hard-to-sing anthem, our scavenger national bird, and our moon landing. Our dollar notes that confound blind people, our coins that don’t include numbers indicating their worth,
our pennies that cost more than a penny to make. We are proud of just about everything that is American — except, I’ll argue, of our food.
For the past 14 years I’ve been on a personal mission to spread the Gospel of American Food. And I’ve had the perfect bully pulpit: as a U.S. diplomat. Diplomacy —
one of the federal government’s few jobs actually mentioned in the Constitution — usually conjures up images of old white dudes in suits shaking hands in front of flags, probably after just having quietly carved up a far-flung country. And that’s partially true: We are still struggling to
eliminate systemic racism from our ranks. But today’s
Foreign Service is not the 20th century relic in which
female diplomats were forced to resign after getting married. Today we’re a group of diverse Americans showcasing the best the U.S. has to offer: we take American musicians abroad, we help recruit students to come study at our universities, we lobby on behalf of U.S. businesses, and we help our experts share their knowledge with the world.
But even we struggle with some things, including this big question: What is American cuisine? Some readers are already bristling at the dissonance of the phrase. Our food is fried Oreos, it’s corn dogs, it’s grilled cheese sandwiches. Workhouse, quotidian, blue-collar: sloppy joes, snack packs, Lunchables. High-fructose corn syrup molded into wannabe-umami sustenance, obligatory carbonated sugar water sluicing down our necks.
Cuisine — itself an imported word — is from other countries, mostly the
ones whose languages have a lot of accent marks. Sure, being a “foodie” is zeitgeisty, we’re the home of
competitive eating, and we’ll debate
whether or not a hot dog is a sandwich, but we aren’t real
gourmands.
I respectfully dissent. We are more than babysitter food. We are the home of the milkshake, fudge, cheesecake, doughnuts, brownies, s’mores, cotton candy, chocolate chip cookies and the ice cream cone — and that’s just
a few of the desserts. Tomatoes, wild rice, squash, almost every variety of bean, cranberries, corn, avocado, cacao, maple trees and the turkey are indigenous to the U.S. or Mesoamerica. Thanks to our insanely diverse geography and climate, we can grow just about anything: bananas in Hawaii, potatoes in Maine, wheat in Kansas, herbs in Colorado. But our real treasure — as a low-rent company’s HR rep would glibly say — is our people. Our cuisine is what it is thanks to Native Americans, European colonizers, enslaved Africans, and the waves of tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to make their grandmas’ food. Thus we are the home of chili, pecan pie, pulled pork, toasted ravioli, sourdough, crabcakes, gumbo, po’ boys, General Tso’s, and fortune cookies. We have some of the best damn food in the world.
I have served as press attaché (Syria), human rights officer (South Africa), visa adjudicator (Peru) and conflict diamonds expert (D.C.). But my favorite gigs have been in the cultural section, where I engaged in what’s called
gastrodiplomacy: creating and strengthening relationships with people, governments and organizations abroad through food, agriculture and the culinary arts.
Also known as culinary diplomacy or food diplomacy, gastrodiplomacy uses foodways as a tool to — sorry for the government-speak — achieve strategic priorities. It’s not just food porn to get clicks for our embassies (
although it should be that, too); it’s a way to increase exports of U.S. food products, encourage people abroad to enroll in American culinary schools, and lure foreign visitors to dine in our marvelous restaurants (those that will weather the COVID storm). In 2012, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton set up the
Diplomatic Culinary Partnership to deputize our top chefs as American culinary ambassadors: top cover for food-loving diplomats to let loose.
The goal of gastrodiplomacy doesn’t have to even have anything to do with food. In Morocco we were trying to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship, so I brought Lincolnite Erik Hustad to share his story of starting with a food truck (that he opened during a Nebraska November!) and building a mini-empire of award-winning
Honest Abe’s burger joints, the fine-dining Sebastian’s Table, and cocktail bar Eleanora. Hustad taught Moroccan cooks how to make
chicken and dumplings, showed culinary students how to concoct (halal)
biscuits & gravy, and competed head-to-head with the reigning Moroccan Master Chef champion. The next year we wanted to highlight sustainability, so I brought chefs
Kirsten and Mandy Dixon to showcase their Alaskan sea-to-table approach to environmentally-conscious dining. In Peru we were trying to increase sales of beef, so James Beard-winning Chicago chef
Debbie Gold introduced Peruvians (and me) to the glories of braised beef cheek. I’ve also gotten into the action myself. I taught a
culinary club how to make chili. For our Election 2016 reception I designed a menu featuring
U.S. Presidents’ favorite foods. I’ve been a judge in a
cooking competition at a U.S.-funded English language school. During Black History Month I led a discussion about the racially-charged debate over “southern cooking” vs. “soul food,” and I taught the participants how to make cornbread. But the best part of gastrodiplomacy is that it
must be an anti-solipsistic two-way street. My guest chefs toured local markets, learned from
local celebrity chefs,
broke bread with national food heroes and
literally sat down with frontline ag workers. After each U.S. Food Week, the American chef went away humbled and better educated. And fatter.
I should note that I don’t come from some sort of culinary pedigree. My granddad was a small-town grocer from Hebron, but I grew up across the bridge from Omaha, a latchkey kid subsisting on Pizza Rolls, Bagel Bites and other processed foods with ™s appended to their names. While a broadcasting major at UNL also working at 10/11, I got sick of my colleagues eating at Fazoli’s and Boston Market every night, so I went on
a mission to eat at every restaurant in Lincoln. During my bildungsroman in Peace Corps in rural Bolivia, I taught myself to make everything I missed — pizza, tortillas, eggs Benedict — from scratch. When I returned to UNL for grad school, I enjoyed halcyon days as
The Daily Nebraskan food critic, championing
the greatest coffee shop in the world,
drinking all the beers, admitting I was
a loser, and getting threatened after a
so-so review. I legit once vomited after losing a moon pie-eating contest in Alabama to a guy named Bubba wearing overalls but no shirt. I am not Michael Pollan’s kid.
Gastrodiplomacy isn’t just my personal obsession. Academics and professionals have proven its effectiveness:
four out of five people say that eating a country’s food has changed their opinion of the country. Nations as diverse as Ethiopia, Turkey, South Korea and
Thailand have benefited from this proven food-and-favorable-opinion flipping. Peru —
the tocayo of our own Nebraskan town — is probably the world leader in using its indigenous crops and delicious dishes to get people interested in traveling or doing business there. Experts have laid out how gastrodiplomacy can do its humble part as a
“dynamic new tactic” to break down barriers and lead to
fewer armed conflicts. It works so well because it subverts the traditional, stuffy government-to-government diplomacy in favor of a person-to-person gemeinschaft direct approach.
Next year I’ll be reassigned somewhere else, and I’m already thinking about the food-related issues we can discuss in diplomacy. And I don’t mean sweeping under the rug America’s problems either. I think the U.S. shines when we put smack dab in the middle of the table our unresolved issues: xenophobia, race relations, health, inequality, and what word we can use instead of
ethnic, just to name a handful I’ve been thinking about lately.
Wherever I’m posted, I’ll be educating people on the highs and lows of food of Nebraska:
the Reuben sandwich, the TV dinner, the McRib, Kool-Aid, the Germans-from-Russia-inspired
meat pie, and the Gödelesque perfect equation of cinnamon with chili. Food is home. And that’s just why gastrodiplomacy has so much untapped potential. We all eat. When the topic is food, we pay attention.