International Organisations, Food and Nationalism

Abstract

The previous chapter finished with a question: when there is contestation of values over cuisine, food culture and diet, who would or should be the arbiter? When there is an international dispute, the first candidates for such a position are usually international organisations. At the one end of the scale, there is a range of international conventions and treaties such as the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948, widely known as the genocide convention, as rule books on how individuals, groups and states should behave, and on the other there are mechanisms through which these rules are implemented, such as the International Criminal Court. In this context, international organisations assume the role of a judge in determining if any crime has been committed, and if so who the perpetrator is and what the punishment should be. Consequently, these international organisations in their efforts to deliver global justice are often seen as independent actors and a restraining factor on the nation-state and other entities; in other words, international organisations are understood to be the suppressors of nationalism and the imposers of global/universal norms and standards. However, in the area with which the current volume is concerned, food, rather than imposing what is deemed to be global or universal standards, international organisations appear to be unwittingly used by the nation-state and other entities in the promotion of national identity or nationalism. This may well be one of the consequences of the spread and permeation of neo-liberalism in reference to culture, as Scher (2010) argues, but the impact of neo-liberalism unfortunately falls outside the scope of this volume.