{"id":2317,"date":"2026-06-26T18:47:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-26T18:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=2317"},"modified":"2026-06-26T18:47:00","modified_gmt":"2026-06-26T18:47:00","slug":"the-fifa-15-is-american-culinary-diplomacy-in-action","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=2317","title":{"rendered":"The \u2018FIFA 15\u2019 is American culinary diplomacy in action"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>As the FIFA World Cup has drawn hundreds of thousands of international fans to host cities across the U.S., a secondary tournament has broken out online \u2014 a cheerful, calorie-dense competition to see how much American food visitors can consume before their flights home. The meme has a name: the FIFA 15, a riff on the dreaded \u201cFreshman 15\u201d that college students famously pack on during their first year away from home. Swap a dormitory dining hall for a Raising Cane\u2019s and a Whataburger, and the math stays roughly the same.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=2315\">A Brookings paper just accidentally explained Zohran Mamdani<\/a><\/p>\n<p>The breakout star is German soccer superfan @FreddyLA7, whose road trip from Georgia to Texas has captivated hundreds of thousands of followers eager to watch him discover America one chain restaurant at a time. Taco Bell was described as \u201cthe holy land,\u201d a late-night Waffle House visit earned a glowing review, and Buc-ee\u2019s left him in disbelief\u2014he posted excited dispatches from Walmart, Wendy\u2019s and Chili\u2019s, while marveling at Atlanta\u2019s greenery and struggling to choose a drink from a Coca-Cola Freestyle machine. As one observer noted on X: \u201cMan is having the most regular time and loving it.\u201d<\/p>\n<div>\n<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>A group visiting Texas from Japan raved about the steak and Caesar salad. A Whataburger pilgrim deemed it \u201cthe best dining experience of my entire life.\u201d A Norway fan tried the impossibly Bostonian combo of clam chowder with a Dunkin\u2019 drink on the side. Houston attorney Jimmy Ardoin captured the collective mood on Threads: \u201cHe walked into a Buc-ee\u2019s and I genuinely think he saw the face of the divine. This man is experiencing America for the first time with the wonder of a newborn and the stamina of a Navy SEAL.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Ranch dressing has been the breakout condiment. A Swedish X user posted: \u201cWhy did no one tell me ranch sauce is like crack? EUROPE WE NEED RANCH ASAP.\u201d After confiscating bottles at checkpoints across the country, the TSA posted on Instagram: \u201cDays since the last airport ranch incident: 0.\u201d Kraft pounced with a limited-edition TSA-approved travel kit. Beyond ranch, international visitors have been going wild for Dunkin, Raising Cane\u2019s, Chipotle, Taco Bell, BBQ, steak, clam chowder, pizza, and deli sandwiches \u2014 and are already plotting how to take some of their discoveries home with them.<\/p>\n<p>The joke is funny. It is also, accidentally, a masterclass in something governments have spent decades trying to manufacture: culinary diplomacy.<\/p>\n<p>Food has long functioned as one of the softest and most durable forms of soft power. The terms \u201cculinary diplomacy\u201d and \u201cgastrodiplomacy\u201d have been in use since the early 2000s, popularized by public diplomacy scholars Paul Rockower and Sam Chapple-Sokol, whose basic premise is that \u201cthe easiest way to win hearts and minds is through the stomach.\u201d The playbook has been deployed by more than a dozen governments\u2014but none more systematically, or more successfully, than Thailand. <\/p>\n<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>In 2002, Thailand launched a government initiative called \u201cGlobal Thai,\u201d aimed at increasing tourism and food exports to boost the country\u2019s economy. Within a decade, the number of Thai restaurants in the world had nearly doubled, largely thanks to loans the Thai government distributed to people willing to open restaurants abroad. The Export-Import Bank of Thailand offered up to $3 million in loans for Thai nationals looking to open a restaurant abroad. Before the program began, there were roughly 5,500 Thai restaurants worldwide; in the following 10 years, that number jumped to over 10,000. <\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=2313\">Leon Black says Epstein\u2019s network included Elon Musk, Sergey Brin and Peter Thiel, while saying \u2018I knew Jekyll. I didn\u2019t know Hyde\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Despite Thai people making up just 0.1% of the U.S. population, there are an estimated 10,000 Thai restaurants across the country \u2014 a ratio that didn\u2019t happen by accident. A study found that for every million people who dine at a Thai restaurant globally, roughly 100,000 will eventually visit Thailand, and since Global Thai launched, the country has seen a 200% increase in tourism, with nearly a third of new tourists citing food as a critical reason for their trip.<\/p>\n<div>\n<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>Scholars of culinary tourism\u2014a field that examines food as both a destination and a diplomatic instrument\u2014say this kind of exchange follows a predictable pattern. Lucy Long, a folklorist at Bowling Green State University who coined the term \u201cculinary tourism\u201d and wrote the field\u2019s foundational text, has argued that the desire to experience \u201cotherness\u201d through food is one of the most powerful and underestimated drivers of cross-cultural connection. <\/p>\n<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>Krishnendu Ray, a food studies professor at NYU and author of <em>The Ethnic Restaurateur<\/em>, has spent his career documenting how cuisines travel\u2014and what it means when they land. Both would likely recognize the FIFA 15 not as a novelty, but as a case study: the same impulse that sends Americans hunting for authentic Neapolitan pizza or a conveyor-belt sushi bar in Tokyo is now sending European fans to a Waffle House at 1 a.m. and rating it a perfect 10.<\/p>\n<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p><em>Fortune<\/em> has tracked how FIFA restructured the World Cup into its biggest payday ever\u2014and how host cities are struggling to capture the windfall. But the food phenomenon unfolding in the margins of the tournament is something no spreadsheet projected. What\u2019s going viral is about abundance and generosity. The free refills, the unlimited ice, the deli owner in a host city who handed a group of British tourists free lunch \u201cbecause they came all this way.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The U.S. has never needed to run a Global Thai-style program. American food\u2014its chains, its portions, its sauces in quantities that alarm European customs officials\u2014has exported itself through movies, television, and decades of cultural ubiquity. In a study conducted by <em>Public Diplomacy Magazine<\/em>, over half of those surveyed said eating a country\u2019s cuisine leaves them with more positive feelings toward that country. The World Cup has simply put that effect into overdrive, placing it in front of people who thought they already knew what American food was.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=2311\">One chart explains the economy\u2019s terrible baby boomer hangover, Gen X\u2019s invisibility, and millennial and Gen Z irrelevance<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>World Cup travelers are flocking to American products like ranch dressing and Raising Cane&#8217;s. That&#8217;s the beauty of bringing people together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2316,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[169],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-food-and-drink"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.7 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>The \u2018FIFA 15\u2019 is American culinary diplomacy in action - Cross Country Moving Team<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=2317\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The \u2018FIFA 15\u2019 is American culinary diplomacy in action - Cross Country Moving Team\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"World Cup travelers are flocking to American products like ranch dressing and Raising Cane&#039;s. 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