“Hypotheses on Food and Peace: Five Ways to Use Social Gastronomy for Peacebuilding” appeared in Nationalism and Ethnic Politics.
King attended the Refugee Food Festival in Paris, which exemplified peacebuilding through culinary arts.
Elisabeth King, vice dean for faculty affairs and professor of international education and politics at NYU Steinhardt, published an article in Nationalism and Ethnic Politics on how peacebuilding theories of change may work in food spaces to shift conflicted groups towards inclusion and belonging.
This article is the first piece of King’s larger study of how diverse and unexpected cultural spaces—such as food, sports, and the arts—can be used for peacebuilding. According to King, this work represents the possibility of developing informal structures that allow conflict-affected groups the opportunity to gain understanding of one another, dispel negative beliefs, and build a foundation for resolving conflicts through non-violent means.
A dish served at the Refugee Food Festival.
“Traditionally, I have done peacebuilding work in formal spaces, such as through government entities,” says King. “This project focuses more on informal cultural spaces that garner widespread interest for people around the world because of their innate pleasure and fun—such as the sports team you support or the kind of art you make. Simultaneously, these spaces can be central to our identities and matter a lot to people, meaning they hold a lot of soft power. Because they are understudied by scholars, I want to explore how we can understand and harness them as strategic sites of influence for peacebuilding.”
The first cultural space that King explored was food, in part because of the wealth of expertise available to her through Steinhardt colleagues in the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies, such as Jennifer Berg, department chair and clinical professor; Fabio Parasecoli, professor; Krishnendu Ray, professor and director of the PhD program; and Lisa Sasson, associate dean for global affairs and experiential learning and clinical professor. Marion Nestle, Paulette Goddard Professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health, emerita, is keen to be interviewed for the project soon.
The Refugee Food Festival took place in Paris in June 2024.
“We have an exceptional Food Studies program here at Steinhardt, and I began talking to faculty to understand more about how food can be so central to personal, familial, national, and cultural identities,” says King. “It was gratifying to learn that these experts in the world of food and culture also think there’s value in the potentiality of this intersection with peacebuilding.”
As one of her examples in the article, King describes the Refugee Food Festival she attended this summer in Paris, during which French chefs paired with refugee chefs to create shared menus and host tasting events for the public.
“The goal of the Festival is to change predominantly negative views of refugees through food,” states King’s article. “By bringing groups into meaningful and pleasurable contact, the festival aims to counter a narrative that refugees are not useful to society and that they and/or their foods are unwelcome.”
French and refugee chefs offered tastings and public culinary demonstrations.
King continues her larger study of these informal cultural spaces; the collective work will comprise a book currently being called How to Use Food, Sports, and Arts to Build Peace (forthcoming).
Her work was supported by an NYU Steinhardt Faculty Challenge Grant and the NYU Global Research Initiative for study at NYU Paris.
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