The cookbook draws on plant-based food traditions from eight post-conflict countries as well as Monaco and the United States, home to FPCD’s international work and its institutional headquarters respectively. Each chapter is not simply a collection of recipes. It is an entry point into a culture, a history, and a people.

Consider what it means to prepare a Syrian dish in 2025. Syria has been the subject of decades of political analysis, humanitarian reporting, and diplomatic negotiation. But a reader who follows a recipe, who learns the spices used in a Syrian home kitchen and the traditions that surround them, arrives at a different kind of understanding. Not a policy position. A human one.

This is what The Peace Cookbook is designed to do. It moves beyond the abstract and into the sensory. It asks readers not to form an opinion about a country, but to engage with it. To cook its food. To sit with its story.

Del Torro, who has spent years working at the intersection of culture and diplomacy, brings both a practitioner’s rigor and a storyteller’s instinct to this project. The result is a cookbook that functions simultaneously as a cultural document, a diplomatic tool, and an invitation to connection.

FPCD has long understood that lasting peace requires more than institutional agreement. It requires the kind of relationship-building that happens when people choose to understand one another. The Peace Cookbook is a tool for exactly that, one that works in home kitchens, embassy dining rooms, community centers, and classrooms.

A peace treaty tells people what they must do. A shared meal shows them what is possible.