Tipping the Scales: A New Understanding of Food’s Power in the Political Sphere

Abstract

The above is but one example that illustrates that food as both a symbolic and consumable item has power in politics. In this paper I seek to create a contemporary theoretical model that can be used to examine and investigate how food is utilised as a form of power in international politics. This framework will categorise the most common political uses of food into three distinct forms of power: the traditional realist ‘hard power’, Joseph S Nye’s ‘soft power’ and a modernised food orientated variant of Hans J. Morgenthau’s ‘power of prestige’.