DAVOS, Switzerland — The roasted chicken served at the “Terrorism Lunch” was loaded with sesame seeds. Across town, at the “Sin Dinner,” the chefs were having a hell of a time slathering their parfaits with blood-orange cream.

Up the hill at the Hotel Belvedere at the 2003 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Douglas Daft, then-chairman and chief executive officer of Coca-Cola Co., was eyeing the cocktail sauce and considering the syrup-to-fizz ratio of his company’s soda pop.

“The Swiss have a good vintage with the proper amount of fizz,” Mr. Daft said after sharing prawns with the president of Mozambique.

“I’ve tasted Coca-Cola in 87 countries and just about every event and restaurant in Davos,” Mr. Daft added at the company’s cocktail party for WEF delegates. “I know these things.”

Almost four decades and thousands of meals after the first round of “poached fillet of char on barley risotto with little vegetables” was served to global leaders in 1970, this year’s powwow of the prosperous kicked off yesterday with the same heartburning question: What’s to eat?

With some 250 private receptions, midnight corporate munch sessions and breakfast, lunch, and dinner seminars with proliferating plotlines ranging from “Russia’s More Muscular Diplomacy” to whether “CEOs are disproportionately affected by depression,” the answer remains the same.

“We don’t know,” WEF press chief Mark Adams said. “What the delegates eat and drink is up to the chefs at the hotels and restaurants where the events are held. They like to surprise.”

Historically, it’s perhaps no surprise that veal — usually schnitzeled — is the most frequent main-course meat served up by the WEF’s Alpine chefs. Bündnerfleisch, a pricey dried-beef delicacy from the Grisons region, is rarely seen on the seminar menu, though some hotels do offer delegates other local specialties such as Capuns (a meat, cheese, and salad-leaf pie) and a drippy sweet nut and honey dessert called Bündner Nusstorte.

Over the past five years, prawns, peeled down and piled high, have been the main attraction at the annual reception hosted by the NYSE Group Inc. Long prawn lines are also guaranteed at the extravagant bashes for delegates sponsored by Google Inc., Citigroup Inc., and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., whose guests are usually entertained with live harp music.

According to WEF founder and Chairman Klaus Schwab, this year’s gathering to discuss “The Shifting Power Equation” is geared to “offer the opportunity for leaders from all cultures and walks of life to shape the global agenda by discussing their differences.” Nowhere over the years have those differences been better on display than around a WEF prawn table.

“Pass the sauce,” the American delegates say. “Where’s the lemon?” the Europeans ask. The Asians mostly eat their prawns au naturel and international incidents do happen.

Back in 2005, the WEF’s theme was “Taking Responsibility for Tough Choices.” But the toughest choice that faced then Iranian Foreign Affairs Minister Kamal Kharrazi that year was how to diplomatically disarm the shrimps staring him in the face at a dinner seminar billed to discover if Iran was “a supporter of civil and human rights, or a suspected friend to terrorists and a nuclear tiger.”

Muslims are forbidden from eating shellfish, so Mr. Kharrazi, the marquee guest that evening along with Senator Biden of Delaware, averted the crisis by quietly asking for a vegetarian meal, and avoiding the pork.

“Then the waiter poured him a glass of wine and waited to see if he found it acceptable before serving the other guests,” golf-course designer Robert Trent Jones Jr., who was Mr. Kharrazi’s dinner companion, said. “The room went dead, stone cold. I told the waiter Islam prohibits the drinking of alcohol.”

Dozens of bottles of wine were quickly removed from the Hotel Belvedere dining room. Mr. Jones read Mr. Kharrazi a poem to lighten the mood, while the waiters and a few guests returned with large bottles of sparkling water and a Coke for the foreign minister.