The Great British Beer Festival is exactly what its name implies. It’s a festival, it’s great, there’s beer — enough of the stuff to soak an entire city — and it’s a proud celebration of brewing traditions that no one else upholds quite like the British...Except, it seems, the Americans.

Sushi's humble beginnings in Tokyo are of only passing interest to University of Wollongong academic Matt Allen and colleague Rumi Sakamoto...the academics' real interest lies in its culinary colonisation of the world in the past 20 or so years and how this has been influential back in Japan.

Taiwan has become the latest country to launch a diplomatic drive based around its national cuisine. President Ma Ying-jeou has ordered his envoys to start talking the language of food by launching a £20m "gastro-diplomacy" campaign in the UK and elsewhere.

The bento-bako, or Japanese lunch box, is enjoying great popularity overseas, with many retailers abroad even marketing the product under its Japanese name.

We need recognition for what we achieve in the normal run of life," Abdulhadi says. "Like people everywhere we love our children, we're chefs, businessmen, carpenters, farmers, industrialists, shopkeepers, we're participants in the society of the world. We're not just a resistance movement fighting the occupation.

As diplomatic efforts to resolve political disputes continue in the Caucasus, civil society groups from countries in the region are working on projects that they hope will help bring hostile nations together.

More recently, Taiwan is trying to expand on its reputation and gastro-brand through an initiative to promote Taiwan through enhanced culinary diplomacy.Gastrodiplomacy is predicated on the notion that the easiest path to winning hearts and minds is found through stomachs.

Ideas and good writing may be fun, good music can be soothing, the cinema and theater are certainly entertaining, and sports and video games are heart-racing. All that is good and well, and all are the flesh and blood of the soft power that many countries try to build and whose management the United States has possibly mastered.