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.

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.