Wheeler del Torro’s new book ‘The Peace Cookbook’ is released as both a culinary work and a cultural diplomacy initiative, bringing together recipes and stories drawn from G7 nations and post-conflict regions across the globe, each chapter tied to a country where del Torro’s Foundation for Post Conflict Development has worked or built lasting partnerships.
Its introduction is written by H.S.H. Prince Albert II of Monaco, and foreword comes from President and Nobel Peace Prize laureate José Ramos-Horta of Timor-Leste. The result is something difficult to categorise and harder to dismiss.
Del Torro has spent decades watching food do what formal language cannot, across more than a hundred countries. He has observed the same pattern, a meal lowers defenses, softens posture, and opens a conversation that a policy brief could not have begun. ‘The Peace Cookbook’ is, in many ways, the accumulated observation of those years.
“The project brings together recipes and cultural stories connected to diplomacy, cooperation, and cultural exchange. The goal is to position the book as both a culinary work and a cultural diplomacy platform that highlights how shared traditions can open the door to conversation during complex global times,” said del Torro to TheAfricanDream.net.
The project found its clearest expression at a dinner in Cambridge, Massachusetts, held to celebrate the creation of the Nasir Jones Fellowship at Harvard University. Around the table were Nas, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Jamaica Kincaid, Lawrence Bobo, and Professor Marcyliena Morgan. Plant-based dishes moved from hand to hand.
Del Torro says the concept of the book became clear to him in that room, and it became necessary for him to write one. The structure of the book reflects this logic. G7 nations anchor it because they anchor global decision-making. But they share space with communities navigating post-conflict recovery including Sierra Leone, Timor-Leste, Afghanistan, Cyprus etc. The pairing is deliberate. “Peace,” del Torro said, “is not a conversation reserved only for the powerful.”
One of the book’s considered choices is its emphasis on plant-based cuisine. Del Torro is clear that this is not a rejection of tradition but a strategic selection. Plant-based food crosses most dietary, religious, and cultural boundaries. For a project centered on bringing different people to the same table, that practicality matters enormously.
The culinary traditions throughout the book were chosen for what they represent, which is what they reveal about a people’s identity before conflict and after it. Reading the chapters, one gets the sense that del Torro is less interested in recipes as instructions than in recipes as documents. They record something about how a culture feeds itself, and therefore something about how it survives.
The involvements of Prince Albert II and President Ramos-Horta were brought in through the Foundation for Post Conflict Development, a women-led institution with decades of field experience in some of the world’s most complex environments. The credibility of that organization opened doors that individual creative project could not have accessed alone.
As someone who lived through conflict and led a nation’s recovery, the Nobel laureate recognized a partner whose work he could genuinely stand behind. His foreword carries the weight of that experience.
Del Torro is explicit about one of the book’s intended audiences, diplomatic missions. He sees embassies as among the most underused cultural tools in modern diplomacy, even though they carry the full identity of a nation. Instead, they often confine their engagement to formal channels.
The Peace Cookbook, he suggests, offers a practical way to activate that identity. It can anchor cultural dinners, and shape national events that move beyond speeches into lived exchange. For post-conflict countries, it offers a different frame, and allow diplomats to present their country through what it sustains, not just what it has endured.
The rollout strategy reflects the book’s ambitions. A soft launch is planned for Monaco in June, during Formula 1 week. The broader release is timed to coincide with the United Nations General Assembly in New York this fall, the largest gathering of global leadership in the world.
Del Torro’s aim is for the book to move across delegations as what he calls a working tool for cultural connection. Given the caliber of its contributors and the seriousness of its institutional backing, that ambition does not seem misplaced.
Written by Oral Ofori
Oral Ofori is Founder and Publisher at www.TheAfricanDream.net, a digital storyteller and producer, and also an information and research consultant.
