Mendoan Diplomacy: A Corpus-Informed Content Analysis of Culinary Heritage as Food-Security Pedagogy in Banyumasan Pesantren Public Discourse

Abstract

Purpose: This study examines how public discourse surrounding mendoan, Banyumas Regency’s officially designated intangible cultural heritage snack, is mobilized by and around pesantren (Islamic boarding schools) to localize Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2, Zero Hunger, in a specific Javanese Ngapak cultural region Findings: Santripreneur food-economy framing is the modal register (33.3% of the corpus), followed by food-security/nutrition-policy framing and religious-ritual food framing (25.0% each), with heritage-branding and regional-linguistic identity framing each present in 16.7% of documents, and formal local-governance framing in 8.3%. These registers do not compete but interlock through what this study conceptualizes as Mendoan Diplomacy: a deliberately “half-cooked” (mendo) discursive strategy that keeps culinary heritage simultaneously traditional enough to claim cultural legitimacy and commercially/nutritionally “ready” enough to serve santripreneur economic activity and national food-security policy, with communal ritual food-sharing (sedekah bumi, kepungan) supplying the underlying theological warrant for both Originality/value: This is the first study to apply a corpus-informed content-analytic design, rather than ethnographic or purely interpretive methods, to pesantren culinary discourse, and the first to theorize a regional snack food as a boundary object mediating heritage, economy, policy, and ritual registers in SDG 2 localization