0:07      Madi Minges: From the School of International Service at American University in Washington, this is Big World, where we talk about something in the world that truly matters. I'm Madi Minges.

0:17      Johanna Mendelson Forman: What does it mean to sit at the table with people who are your enemies? And I think it's a very powerful question because the table has a role of not necessarily always building trust, but creating a civil way to engage.

0:34      MM: That was Professor Johanna Mendelson Forman. She and her colleague, Andrea Borghini, join us to discuss the symbolism of the dining table and the place it holds in international relations. Now, you might be thinking, "What does food have to do with politics and international relations?" It turns out, a lot. Eating food is a universal experience that can take on many forms in many cultures. Where we eat, what we eat, and who we dine with all have applications and implications in international affairs.

1:07      MM: Today we're having a dinner table style conversation as we discuss the symbolism of the dining table and how food can be a tool for peace. I'm Madi Minges and I'm joined by Johanna Mendelson Forman and Andrea Borghini. Johanna is a professor here at the School of International Service. She's the creator of Conflict Cuisine, which is an interdisciplinary course about the role of food and conflict that she teaches at SIS. She also researches gastro-diplomacy and social gastronomy, and she is a distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center.

1:40      MM: Andrea is a professor at the University of Milan. His work is grounded in food philosophy, and he develops theoretical tools and models to rethink culinary cultures and how we approach food and eating. Thank you, Johanna, Andrea, for joining me on Big World.

1:55      JMF: Thanks, Madi.

1:57      Andrea Borghini: Thank you. Our pleasure.

1:58      MM: I thought maybe a great place for us to start in this episode would be discussing the concept of the dining table. What can the dining table symbolize, and what role does it play in politics and trust building?

2:15      JMF: Well, maybe I can just say since your introduction was so clear that for those who don't understand, there's a whole discipline of culinary diplomacy, soft power in international relations concept. Symbolism, which is something that my colleague, Andrea, the philosopher, works on. What do these things mean? So in addition to just eating at a table, there are many ways in which the table has many functions.

2:46      JMF: But I wanted to start when we were talking about this earlier, because one of the most interesting poems I've ever read about tables was written by a former American Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo, which was called "Perhaps the World Ends Here." And I want to read just the first three lines, which are, "The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live. The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on." Then it says at the end, "Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite." I think that is a way to set our own table for this conversation. Don't you think so, Andrea?

3:36      AB: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's such a beautiful poem. It's a great way of starting. And one thing that I like also about the poem is that it leaves open to, of course, imagination to think of what that table looks like, what it is like. And of course, if we go into the homes even of people in DC today, we'll find probably lots of different tables.

3:59      AB: So sometimes when we think of sharing a table, we might take for granted this tool. But instead, tables also in the history, our colleagues, precisely in history, in anthropology and so on and so forth, they teach us that tables have taken lots of different shapes and heights. And of course, in some cultures you don't sit exactly at the table, but you sit around, for example, a plate, a very large plate where we share food.

4:36      AB: So the table here, as you said, Johanna is a symbol for something that the means really coming together through the food. And you mentioned of course, the importance of the power of food, which is a soft power in this case, of bringing people together. And that's what we wanted to talk about. So all these different ways of coming together that are allowed by having something in between us, but also that connects us. And I think maybe another topic that we also discussed and Johanna respect to this, another text that is quite nice in this respect conveying this concept is the book by Adam Gopnik that precisely talks about tables, right?

5:26      JMF: Right. There are many, many books if you go into both literature and history that examine the table as a literary phenomena, as a sociological phenomena. And we missed one thing, Andrea, that the floor can also be a table. There are many cultures that don't have what we have as wooden tables. They spread a cloth on the floor and they have their feasts that way. This is very common in countries like Afghanistan and India, in parts of the Middle East where the table is really a concept.

5:59      JMF: And if we're going to sit around something, we obviously want to trust the people we're sitting with. And I think that's a big part of what the table means, is that when you share something like food, you're not only trying to enjoy a meal because everybody has to eat, but you're trying to build some kind of a community.

6:24      AB: Yeah. In that respect, I remember recently, I just published a book that is on the spaces where we eat, and we didn't want to make it only about tables, but it was about their political value ultimately starting from the objects precisely like tables or what philosophers call it, the ontology on the tools, the entities that really comprise, constitute the space that we come to share with others when we dine.

6:56      AB: And in chapter two of that book, precisely one book that came very close to say some of the things we were saying is this book also by Flammang called Table Talk: Building Democracy One Meal at A Time, which precisely looks at how this is in the US context. You can build ideas that could be also ideas of respecting each other's opinions and coming to see the insights of other people that might have opinions precisely might be distant from yours around food, around the meal.

7:38      AB: But precisely one of the shortcomings we found in that perspective was that it was taking the table literally as an item. And instead, in many cases, in many cultures, you don't actually have a table as an object. And then of course, sometimes tables can be round and they allow for a certain kind of equality, and

8:00      AB: ... in other cases, they are rectangular, long, high, where only some people can reach the height of the table, or they can be instead low to accommodate, I don't know, children or other kinds of-

8:15      JMF: Right, and I think what's interesting about the table as a proxy for power, is that the whole area of culinary diplomacy, using food as a tool to persuade or to cajole is a relatively modern phenomena. But yet eating is a very ancient phenomena. You really have to understand how it was used.

8:40      JMF: For example, when the Romans conquered a place, they often offered a feast after the conquest because that was a way of getting their surviving enemies, or at least in the leadership, to become part of their ruling class, not always. But then in the 18th century, the French and the 17th century as well, showed power by the food they put on the table. So these feasts that were 20 course feasts, which probably took days to prepare, and there are many descriptions and many pieces of literature about it, were a demonstration of how wealthy a country was, how much food they could put on the table. Or as Andrea said, you didn't necessarily need a table to feed refugees, or to feed people in camps. I mean, it was a symbol of what you could put on the ground to allow people to eat. So the table is a proxy for many things, identity, power, justice, that are something to consider.

9:45      MM: Yeah. I wanted to build on that a little bit more, Johanna, I know you, I want to talk about these intersections where the dining table intersects with these major issues. I know you were talking about these power dynamics, but I'm curious if we could talk more about intersections of identity and social justice that also happen at the dining table?

10:08      JMF: Adam Gopnik in his book about the French table, I mean it's a history really of dining in France, one of the things he mentions at the end of his book, is that he discovers that this confidant that he's writing to is actually from a family who was very anti-Semitic. He discovers this in a history. Then he goes into a history of very famous food critics who were actually collaborators with the Vichy Government in France. The question he raises, and Andrea, you're the philosopher, you have to answer this, is what does it mean to sit at the table with people who are your enemies?

10:49      JMF: I think it's a very powerful question, because the table has a role of not necessarily always building trust, but creating a civil way to engage. It brings up the British, who probably would be at wars if it not had this level of civility of dining together, even though a lot of the Philosophers disagreed with theories. So I think that's something we should think about as well when you think about the table as a proxy. But Andrea, you're the philosopher, so I defer to you about what this all means.

11:24      AB: This brings to my mind two things. One is that, one, it's about tables and power, and if you want social justice, different way of thinking about that. Then the other is about food, the power of food. The first is about the tables. There is this, there is also the ways in which a table, you get to a table and what could be the table, even in this more abstract sense, and what that can bring to you. So even in the example of Gopnik, but you can think of other examples as well, if you have your enemy invited at the table, is that table going to be adjusted to whatever are your kinds of tables, your ways of sitting at a table, of dining or not? As we know, there are lots of social norms around tables. Besides before we were mentioning just the shape of the furniture, the height and things like that, or whether you have a piece of furniture or not.

12:25      AB: But then there could also be rules and norms about how we sit around the table, who can join the table, how, in which are there? This can really tell us a lot of, and do this also with my students, ask them not just the kitchen, but also whether they sit at a table at home, and what does that look like? What are the social norms? From that, you can really get to talk a lot about, in that sense, the power dynamics and family dynamics, identity dynamics.

12:56      AB: But there is also something else in a lot of history, for example, colonial history, there's also the idea of adopting a table from a culture that you see as more aspirational or superior. So for example, that's the precise, the history of the dining table as we often think of it in more standard ways, like say in an advertisement today, the way in which it was spread in East Asia or Southeast Asia, in lots of parts actually of the globe where you had the colonial history. And from certain parts of Europe, the dining table as a type of piece of furniture traveled as a piece of aspiration, where you wanted to behave and to belong to the table like those people that maybe you wanted to emulate were doing.

13:40      AB: So you have identity there, but also aspiration. And you have power in that sense. But then you also have these questions of precisely justice and belonging to the table. But then there is the fact of the food. Why is it, you could speculate in this way about of pieces of furniture around the house. Why is the table so meaningful? Why is breaking bread with someone so powerful? This is also where Johanna, probably you have done a lot of work in that, what's the power of food? Because it's not just about the furniture, or what we have in the middle.

14:16      JMF: No, of course not. And there is something about sharing a meal that builds trust. There's ample research in the psychological field that shows that people who actually dine together have a better result in resolving a dispute, or resolving some differences, than if you did it without a meal. I think that has been confirmed in the business literature, as well as in the social literature. So when we at the university want tables in the dining room to be common tables, we want it so that students learn about each other and learn about their cultures. It's interesting, the London School of Economics had a big problem in their dining rooms, and somebody wrote a paper about it, because the foreign students wouldn't eat with the British students. So they created dining clubs so that they would have opportunities to make food from other cultures and invites other students to join the table.

15:15      JMF: Because that's another question about what you eat at the table, is very much a reflection of who you are and your culture. It's a big shock, not only to sit at the table, but to have food that is completely different than what you've been raised on. So that's another important cultural divide that can be bridged through the table. But there's also a study that Harvard Divinity School did, which I always like, which says, today, in a world where religion has grown less important, or organized religion, dining together has become an important part of the social interaction of the Millennials and even the Gen X'ers, because it's a way of

16:00      JMF: Celebrating and having a community that is not necessarily religious, but secular.

16:06      AB: Yeah. Can I add something here? Something that comes to mind also, it's a question almost I have even for Madison, because then today, more and more in scholarship and in real life, we find also this idea of digital dining, right? Instead, here we are of course talking about actually sharing the food, right? Is the food being the same. And I think there is something there that is really rooted into our probably emotional and the aspect of trusting what it is that you're doing, the process of dining together. Where if you dine together, you actually share the food.

16:48      AB: There is a level of trust, emotional involvement that maybe is not achieved in digital commensality, that's called digital commensality because in that case, I eat my food, you eat your own food, and maybe we're apart. And so the sharing component there is different. But I don't know. This is also a question that I have for you here. As we think about sharing something, and maybe Madison being also very acquainted with cultures, with groups of people, more younger, more forward with respect to this kind of experiences, if you have anything to share there, because it's a really important point. Could we build advance a dialogue democracy piece even with digital tables? They'll be very easy, but-

17:39      JMF: Yeah, I think there is in fact a project, and you mentioned before we go on that the word commensality, we didn't bring it up, but "co" means together and "mensality" means table. So it actually, the fancy or anthropological term for coming together around a table has its roots in the actual Latin table word. And what you were talking about, Andrea, is that you can have virtual commensality because during some of these conflicts, one of my former students actually set up a project where he would have dinners between Iranian students and American students, and they would do it virtually inside a big container.

18:27      JMF: So they had a container in Washington and a container in Tehran, and they would be eating their dinner and having a conversation. And I think the project still exists. They're doing it with refugees on Lesbos who've escaped from terrible conditions with people around different countries. So even the idea of dining with different people virtually has gotten a lot of resonance in a world that's very conflictive or hostile where you can't go and visit people face to face.

18:59      MM: Yeah, I find that really interesting too because I just know growing up in the "I" generation, it's interesting because I feel like social media has also given to the rise of these parasocial relationships where it's you don't have a true connection with that person. It's almost like that idea of the digital dining table where it's like, "Oh, because I watched this person's life, I feel like I know them and I feel like I am connected to them." But when in reality, you miss that connection part, when you're not sitting at a physical table. You think you know this person, you're seeing this very curated version of this person, you don't really know them.

19:42      MM: So I think it's interesting to talk about, yeah, the table really does serve as this place for real genuine connection that can go a lot of different ways. And I think one of the things I wanted to touch on and ask both of you about too has to do with food. I know for me, imagining the dining table, I'm imagining my mom's Christmas table with all of the fixings, everything set out, or really any holiday table in my family. My mom really goes all out, and it's a place for us to gather. I want to talk about food specifically how it functions as a proxy for different types of behavior, whether that's political, social, or economic behavior. Could we talk a little bit about that?

20:35      JMF: Sure. Well, that's a subject of a whole other podcast, but we do know that food has become an important tool for teaching people skills in order to find employment. Food has been politicized, so that, for example, in the Ukraine, which went to get a UNESCO World Heritage protection for borscht was actually able to secure it as an emergency declaration by UNESCO, the United Nations Economic, its social cultural agency, because they claimed that the Ukrainians invented Borscht and Russia didn't. That became a political fight, and it was a very powerful political fight because Russia always felt that they owned borscht. Who owns a food is very important, and that's what we call gastro-nationalism, when you have this very strong connection with a cuisine or a particular food, and then someone tries to take it from you.

21:39      AB: Another thing is also the relationship here between the space and the food as a symbol, right? So certain foods really symbolize for certain communities like family or a holiday or friendship. There are lots of different meanings. And this is often important to keep in mind even for people that design, say, dietary guidelines, how certain foods could symbolize certain things. And then for people that design home spaces or precisely furniture, it could be how do those places relate to certain specific foods? And it's important that you have that possibility. So it's having the food and then having the right place where to eat it. Not every food can be easily accommodated to every place. And often the table is precisely something that enables. Imagine if you think of where you were dining with your mother, there would've been certain foods that really belong there.

22:43      AB: Maybe you don't want to eat those in a restaurant, not even as a street food or in a picnic. They belong there. And this is, I think what is really powerful is that combination of the whole practice of sharing and the values that come with it are entangled between the space and the food, and then the practices, of course, the norms that having that table allows. In this respect the idea of a table has been also used, I think, quite meaningful in a number of cases, also by artists. Johanna knows this. We often talk about the use of food and sharing food, and food experiences as formats of public art or art has a value. So think of a very famous case here in the US is the Judy Chicago, this installation in the seventies between I think 74 and 79, food installations that were meant to bring together women to talk about all the issues of women in society at the time. And then talking about digital in a sense or commensality, or commensality

24:00      AB: ... it's like a distance. You had also an artwork that was done, another performance, that was done off of Judy Chicago's dinner party, which was like an international dinner party where basically seen simultaneously, like then the Live 8 concerts that happened a few years later, but simultaneously, a number of women dined together, even though at distance, right, to symbolize international solidarity between women around the table. So there you can think of even... You can analyze the menu and the foods and think of how here you have art, food and place that come together to have a symbolic meaning that is quite powerful.

24:47      JMF: And I think while we're talking about that, we also want to talk about how women are often excluded from the table in certain cultures, and it remains a feature of that culture. For example, places like Pakistan, depending on what your class, women prepare the food, they work very hard to make very elaborate meals and then they're not even allowed to sit with the men in their communities while they eat, and if there's anything left they may get scraps of food, but often women are denied food because they don't seem to be equivalent in terms of a right to eat, which is also something that exists in the 21st century, so I think who is not at the table, especially in certain cultures, is a very important part of your conversation about western women who were looking at women's rights and the whole feminist movement versus certain cultures that exclude women.

25:46      AB: Yeah, no, I laugh sometimes I think about it. Even in my family a number of women behave like that in the sense that if you go back to farmers in Italy, even just one generation or two, a lot of women, they didn't sit at the table, and sometimes they didn't sit at a table in private spaces, but in some other cases also they didn't sit at a table in public spaces because they just didn't go there. So maybe the men who go out every day, every evening, but not the women, but in many cases, even just they wouldn't eat yet. They would eat for last and then they would not sit at a table, but sit nearby a fireplace or in another spot, so yeah, yeah.

26:29      MM: To end our conversation, Johanna and Andrea, I want to switch gears and I want to ask you about another meaning of coming around the dining room table. So as we look at the world, we see conflict around us. What does it mean to come around the dining table and how can it be a tool for peace?

26:51      JMF: So I was always looking to see if I could find the right answer to that question, and I think back of a class that I taught in Kiev in Ukraine. When I was talking to a young diplomat, I was giving them courses about gastro diplomacy, and he approached me during the break and he said, "Do you really think food can build peace with the Russians?" and I said, "Well," I said, "I think I'd be too much of an optimist to think that, but it's the first step. It's a bridge." And then another colleague whom I work with in Turkey said, "You have to look at food as a bridge. It won't solve the conflict, but it certainly can provide a way to start getting people to talk."

27:39      JMF: And if you think about peace negotiations, they're often done in isolated places where people have dinners and they get together, and in private they can do things. I was just listening to President Clinton reflecting on his time when he would go with another world leader and they'd be able to eat in the private dining room at the White House, and a lot of work was accomplished, versus big diplomatic dinners were more showpieces of power, but the negotiations with the heads of state were less likely to resolve anything. But I don't know what Andrea thinks.

28:18      AB: Beautiful, beautiful. No, the only thing I can think here is with respect to a lot of other modalities of engagement, food clearly is embodied and it shakes us and transforms us also emotionally. For one, that's one of the reason why it can be also very powerful besides some of the other things we talked about before, but certainly there is that it can shake us, it transforms us. So as we eat, oftentimes it's the case that when you end the meal is different from when you started, and in number of cases better, now in the sense that people are... They really... If at the beginning they didn't know each other, then they come to create bonds through the sharing, all of these things that we talked about. In the end, they're also emotional and they are embodied.

29:08      AB: But one thing, when I think about how can we really leverage on this type of knowledge and create the right kind of conversations, I wouldn't turn maybe to philosophers, but I'll turn more to artists in this sense. I think artists, starting from people in the culinary arts that can really transform us through tasting something, and then also artists that are capable of creating experiences, performances that change us, that lead us to behave also differently and to find new meanings in what we do in our actions. I think those are the ones that, at least as of now, I'd like to mobilize more in these type of projects. It'll be really important. What would be a world probably without artists? These people are more creative, I think. And as we know, often dining goes with music too, and it's another kind of art that often accompanies, but I think it's really important to give the power to these occasions.

30:10      AB: So can the food help us here? Probably, if we do it in a certain way, so if we really get to that emotional transformation that probably the arts can lead us to.

30:25      MM: Johanna Mendelson Forman and Andrea Borghini, thank you for joining Big World and talking about the dining table and its role in international affairs. It's been a pleasure to speak with you.

30:35      JMF: Thank you, Madi.

30:36      AB: Thanks. Our pleasure.

30:39      MM: Big World is a production of the School of International Service at American University. Our podcast is available on our website, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you listen. If you liked what you heard, please leave us a rating or review. Our theme music is "It Was Just Cold" by Andrew Codeman. Until next time.