The impression I got was of a post-globalist fragmented planet, where the ancient cultural groupings of old have long since dissolved, but in tough times the borders have reformed around other differences. Possibly it’s even an evolution from a corporatist world, where companies like nestle and moderna and microsoft and raytheon founded their own factory city states that have now grown into entire countries. That would explain the specialisations we see here.
Calling it “the cooking country” is pretty lazy, but I’ve always gotten the impression that not much effort would be put into the home countries. It’s as if they’re meant to be viewed not as countries, but as concepts, and the characters we see are the natural result of people who grew up immersed in those concepts. The setting of the story is a battle of ideologies, forced onto people who may or may not embody those ideologies. I suspect the point is that the characters who rise above these one-dimensional concepts are the ones who prove themselves to be the most capable leaders.