U.S. Food Diplomacy Landscape: An Exploratory Case Study

Abstract

This exploratory research was undertaken to map out the current landscape of U.S. food diplomacy. This was one of the first studies to condense existing food diplomacy literature to categorize the terms associated with food diplomacy types.The four types are gastrodiplomacy, food security. food assistance, and culinary diplomacy. It was also one of the first studies to explore food diplomacy interactions as manifested by U.S. Embassy Facebook posts. Posts from 18 U.S. Embassy Facebook pages were searched for keywords pertaining to food diplomacy. These posts were content-analyzed for key features indicative of digital engagement practices by the embassy, specifically interactivity, personalization, sentiment: tone, sentiment: emotion, and relevance (Strauß et al., 2015). Additionally, posts were content-analyzed for the dialogic tenets of the dialogic theory of public relations (Kent and Taylor, 2002). The results of the current research provided evidence for the value of further research on the topic of food diplomacy, not only in the U.S., but in any country that uses food culture as a means of bridging cross-cultural gaps.