Georgian Table, NATO Feast: Power Has Always Been Served on a Plate

There is a moment in any serious diplomatic meal when the food stops being food. It becomes statement. It becomes argument. It becomes the clearest possible declaration of who you believe yourself to be — because no government chooses a state dinner menu carelessly, and no cook who has ever fed the powerful has done so without understanding the weight of what they're serving.

The NATO summit in Ankara placed that weight squarely on Turkish soil this week, and the menu sent to thirty-six heads of state and government became, almost immediately, its own parallel summit — debated, dissected, praised, and criticised with the same intensity as anything discussed in the official sessions. The dishes were traditional, rooted, unmistakably Anatolian. Commentators online argued about representation — which region got its dishes chosen, which got left out, whether the selection was politically freighted or merely culinarily conservative. Turks who grew up eating those dishes weighed in. Turks who grew up eating different dishes weighed in harder.

I found myself not surprised by any of it. Because this is what food does. It has always done this.

Go back to Georgian London — to the city that Peter Ross recently walked through on *History Extra*, that layered, gaslit, surprisingly familiar city — and you find the same dynamic playing out at every level of society. The Georgian table was intensely, aggressively communicative. What you served told your guests exactly what you were worth, what you had access to, who you knew, how far your reach extended. A pineapple at the centre of a dining table in 1780 was not a fruit. It was a declaration. They were so expensive, so difficult to procure, that some hostesses rented them purely for display — to be seen, not eaten. The theatre of the table mattered as much as anything on it.

What strikes me about Georgian eating, though, is how much of it was actually recognisable — roasts, pies, chops, puddings, the great English tradition of cooking something until it surrenders. But interwoven with that were the spice routes, the colonial trade winds, the sugar that built fortunes and broke bodies, the tea that restructured an entire nation's daily rhythm. Every dish on a Georgian table was a compressed history of empire and appetite. Nothing was innocent. Nothing was just dinner.

The NATO menu carries exactly that charge. Turkish cuisine is not monolithic — it is one of the great synthesis cuisines of the world, built from the Silk Road, from Ottoman expansion and contraction, from the kitchens of Topkapi palace and the hearths of Anatolian villages, from the grape-growing valleys of the Aegean and the fishing boats of the Black Sea coast. To distil all of that into a state dinner for thirty-six world leaders is an act of extraordinary editorial pressure. You are choosing, in those dishes, what story you want to tell about yourself. You are saying: this is who we are, this is where we came from, this is what we offer.

I think about this whenever I sit down at a Maltese table and watch someone who has never been here try to place the flavours. The Arabs who shaped the language left their signatures in the spicing — cumin, coriander, the sweetness in savoury things. The Knights of St John brought their French and Provençal sensibilities. The British left a deeply confusing legacy that includes both the love of corned beef tinned goods and the habit of eating at odd hours. The Sicilians were here before all of them, and probably since. Every bite of *fenkata* — rabbit braised slow with wine and wild thyme — is a document. You just have to know how to read it.

What the Ankara menu controversy reveals, underneath all the noise, is that people understand this instinctively. They may not articulate it as culinary semiotics or gastronomic diplomacy, but they feel it. They know, in their gut — literally — that being represented in a state dinner matters. That the choice of dishes is not neutral. That when a government serves food to the most powerful people on earth, it is making claims about national identity in the most visceral language available.

The Georgians understood this. Every civilisation that has ever fed its guests with intention has understood this. The NATO chefs in Ankara understood this, even if some of the commentators disagreed with their choices.

The best diplomatic meals are the ones where you eat something and think: *I didn't know this existed