The 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (CSICH) was not intended to have legal repercussions in international trade. Nevertheless, intangible cultural heritage (ICH) may interact with trade regulation under various scenarios. The CSICH “Representative List” inscribes numerous ICH elements with real and potential international commercial aspects and consequent trade law implications. These emergent trade law–ICH regime dynamics require not only some critical reflection (for example, is safeguarding of ICH ultimately dependent on commodification or, at least in some cases, significantly prone to commercial capture?) but also doctrinal legal analysis. This article undertakes a survey of many plausible ICH–trade interactions (generally excluding intellectual property issues), providing an analytical framework with reference to a series of case sketches of selected CSICH inscriptions such as kimjang, beer culture in Belgium, and yoga. These and other cases may indeed raise issues under world trade law, including the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the General Agreement on Trade in Services, the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade, the Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures, and subsidies regulation. Trade law may have underestimated the significance of ICH as a growing field. At the same time, ICH law may be developing without thinking through how it is impacted by commercial interests and international trade law.

Following debate surrounding nominations of food practices for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s lists of intangible cultural heritage (ICH), 10 years after the entry into force of the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, we observe that the ICH lists count a growing number of food-related heritage elements. Yet food, or even gastronomy, as a cultural domain within ICH has yet to be officially recognized. However, given the trade policies arising from the new globalization, which subject peoples and the planet to imported, globalized, and standardized models and which generate an impoverishment of agricultures and food cultures, major geo-economic issues will play out around this recognition. Thus, along with identification labels of quality and origin that protect certain products and know-how from counterfeiting, other forms of protection could be put into place for the benefit of intangible food heritage inscribed on national lists and of the products, goods, services, industries, and cultural spaces in which they are embedded. From the perspective of safeguarding cultural diversity, which any inscription of ICH should lead to, these protections could operate not only through the cultural policies within safeguarding plans but also through the creation of a new binding legal instrument—“the heritage brand”—which could become an important facet of international trade law.

This article focuses on the issue of framing of food in international law, as a means to highlight the specific dimensions of food that are the focus of food as heritage under the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. The specific example of Mexican traditional cuisine is used as a prism through which to analyze regulatory choices across a range of organizations in the United Nations System, yielding a number of frames: food as heritage, food as a human right, food as indigeneity, food as biodiversity, and food as a regulatory object. The frames are natural consequences of the mandates of the bodies addressing food, and the article argues that food as heritage needs to be more clearly engaged with other dimensions of food in international law, lest food becomes just a tourist attraction under the intangible heritage regime.

“Washoku, traditional dietary cultures of the Japanese” was inscribed in UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2013, joining the company of French, Mexican, and Mediterranean “national” food traditions in the exclusive List. Although a relatively novel abstraction, washoku (literally “Japanese food”) was formally defined and recreated by a panel of government-appointed experts for inscription purposes.

This paper investigates washoku’s evolution into intangible heritage and the consequences of inscription. Analysis of field data from official meetings and primary text sources reveal that Japanese food heritage was both influenced and undermined by UNESCO’s intangible heritage system and the overriding precedent set by the “gastronomic meal of the French.” The example of washoku, though successfully inscribed, casts doubts on the feasibility of national food traditions in UNESCO’s system for intangible heritage, including their roles in promoting cultural diversity and heritage preservation.

“Traditional” foodways are represented as an important part of cultural heritage in Europe. Two legal instruments aim to play a role in safeguarding them—namely, the Traditional Specialties Guaranteed (TSG) scheme and the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. These instruments are sometimes used in parallel—for example, in the TSG registration for “Pizza Napoletana” and the nomination of “the art of Neapolitan ‘pizzaiuolo’” to one of the lists of the Convention. While recognizing the important role of state actors in this process, this article proposes going beyond a simple “misappropriation” thesis to look at the possible economic effects of registration and inscription.

The Mediterranean Diet was one of the first food-related nominations on the international cultural heritage list. By introducing the concepts of “epistemic community” and “governmentality” to analyze this heritagization process, I will evaluate the participation and consent of “the Mediterranean people” and their belief in a common identity based in a holistic conception of this food tradition—the so-called diaita. My goal is to demonstrate that the inscription’s proposal was motivated first by a long-term strategy aimed at promoting an “umbrella brand” of agro-food products extended to the whole Mediterranean space. Then, I will emphasize the attempt to design a model of property rights protection that is adequate for this food label, which was later presented within the realm of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization as a measure for safeguarding the diaita as an item of intangible cultural heritage. Finally, I will argue that this claim totally omits the rights of the numerous expatriates living outside this region.