Food for Geopolitical Thought

Anny Gaul on the history of the tomato in Egypt and what it can teach us about global foodways

Food doesn’t often enter conversations about foreign policy, but it is integral to it. Our relationship to food shapes ideas of identity and nationalism and is continuously impacted by the forces of history. Technological, social, and political changes inform and alter global foodways over time. And in today’s interconnected world, food supply chains are inextricable from geopolitics.

In this episode, the Institute for Global Affairs’ Jonathan Guyer is joined by Anny Gaul, a cultural historian and professor of Arabic studies at the University of Maryland, to explore the geopolitics of food in the Middle East. They discuss Anny’s new book, Nile Nightshade: An Egyptian Culinary History of the Tomato, and how global events both shape and are informed by one of our most basic forms of sustenance.

Anny Gaul is a cultural historian, professor of Arabic studies at the University of Maryland, and author of the food blog Cooking with Gaul. She is the author of Nile Nightshade: An Egyptian Culinary History of the Tomato (University of California Press, 2025) and co-editor of Making Levantine Cuisine: Modern Foodways of the Eastern Mediterranean (University of Texas Press, 2022). Her writing has appeared in Foreign Policy, The Nation, and Eater.

Check out Nile Nightshade: https://www.ucpress.edu/books/nile-nightshade/paper

Read an excerpt of the book in Foreign Policy: https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/11/07/egypt-tomato-price-food-agriculture-culinary-history/

Find Anny on X: https://x.com/annygaul

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