Gastrodiplomacy in Turkey: ‘saving the world’ or neoliberal conservative cultural policies at work

Abstract

Gastrodiplomacy is an external project because it is a struggle to represent and promote a country internationally. It is, however, an internal project as well since building a ‘strong’ nation is foremost a domestic public project. In this article, we focus on how a sense of nation is created in Turkey’s gastrodiplomacy efforts and how these turn into cultural policy when we recognize the domestic public as the target. To be able to discuss gastrodiplomacy and its discontents in Turkey, we look at First Lady Emine Erdoğan’s use of culinary culture for promotional purposes. We particularly focus on the first gastrodiplomacy project of Turkey–the publication of a Turkish cookbook and its book launch in 2021. Our main aim is to understand how Emine Erdoğan uses food to dictate a specific political agenda and how this political agenda has to do with conservative gender politics and neoliberal cultural policies.