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center for food and culture

Culinary Tourism

CULINARY TOURISM: “Eating Out Of Curiosity”

—“the intentional, exploratory participation in the foodways of an Other”  (Long, 2004) “Exploring the world through food.” Also known as gastrotourism and food tourism.

The phrase “ culinary tourism ” was coined by folklorist Dr. Lucy Long to explore the meanings, motivations, and implications of seeking food experiences different from our usual ones. She introduced it at scholarly conferences in 1996 and first used it in print in 1998. It was later the title of Long’s edited volume (2004) and has since been adopted internationally by the tourism industry to refer to highlighting food as a tourist destination and attraction. Long has also applied her concepts to food-related programs throughout the world, to educational strategies in museums (particularly the Smithsonian Institution Folklore Festival), and to tourism initiatives. She developed a model for culinary tourism in the Bowling Green Tourism Trail (Ohio) that focuses on introducing tourists to the food culture of the area.

Long’s model of culinary tourism offers ways in which tourism can be used for cultural education and interpretation as well as for economic, social, and environmental sustainability. This “eating out of curiosity” also offers a way of exploring the world. Food opens up new cultures for us. It offers a window into the lives of other people, other times and regions, religions, belief systems, and social classes. Such exploration can be done through cookbooks, cooking shows, grocery stores, family recipes, and everyday meals in our own kitchens as well as through travel, fine dining restaurants, and exotic or gourmet foods. This understanding of culinary tourism also makes us aware of the power food has to carry memories, affirm relationships, construct identity, and encourage artistic self-expression.

Most of us approach new foods with a certain amount of curiosity: will it taste good; will it make us sick; can it really be eaten? But some of us also approach new food as an adventure, as an opportunity to try new experiences. This spirit of adventure characterizes culinary tourism. “Eating out of curiosity” introduces us not only to foods that are new to us, but also to a way of exploring the world. Food opens up new cultures for us. It offers a window into the lives of other people, other times and regions, religions, belief systems, and social classes. And such exploration can be done through cookbooks, cooking shows, grocery stores, family recipes, and everyday meals in our own kitchens as well as through travel, fine dining restaurants, and exotic or gourmet foods.

“Culinary tourism is about food as a subject and medium, destination and vehicle, for tourism. It is about individuals exploring foods new to them as well as using food to explore new cultures and ways of being. It is about groups using food to “sell” their histories and to construct marketable and publicly attractive identities, and it is about individuals satisfying curiosity. Finally, it is about the experiencing of food in a mode that is out of the ordinary, that steps outside the normal routine to notice difference and the power of food to represent and negotiate that difference.” ( Long, 2004)

Culinary Tourism , edited by Lucy M. Long, Univ. Press of Kentucky, 2004.

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Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics pp 552–559 Cite as

Culinary Tourism

  • Lucy M. Long 3  
  • Reference work entry
  • First Online: 01 January 2019

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Cultural tourism ; Food tourism ; Gastronomic tourism ; Sustainable tourism

Introduction

Culinary tourism is the focus on food as an attraction for exploration and a destination for tourism. Although food has always been a part of hospitality services for tourists, it was not emphasized by the tourism industry until the late 1990s. It now includes a variety of formats and products – culinary trails, cooking classes, restaurants, farm weekends, cookbooks, food guides, and new or adapted recipes, dishes, and even ingredients. While most culinary tourism focuses on the experience of dining and tasting of new foods as a commercial enterprise, it is also an educational initiative channeling curiosity about food into learning through it about the culture of a particular cuisine, the people involved in producing and preparing it, the food system enabling access to those foods, and the potential contribution of tourists to sustainability.

Culinary tourism involves numerous issues; many...

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Center for Food and Culture, Bowling Green, OH, USA

Lucy M. Long

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Department of Philosophy and Religion, University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA

David M. Kaplan

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Long, L.M. (2019). Culinary Tourism. In: Kaplan, D.M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1179-9_416

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culinary tourism foodways

McDonald’s Spent $50 Million on TV Advertising in April

Papa john’s claims it’s still on track despite more losses, google wants to tell you what to eat.

Charcuterie and cider tasting at Spirit Tree Estate Cidery in Headwaters, Ontario. - Agatha Podgorski, Culinary Tourism Alliance

Looking at the Foundations of Food Tourism Through ‘Foodways’

Thinking about a region’s “foodways,” or how its food, culture, and history connect, can help destinations tell meaningful, unique stories to travelers.

— Culinary Tourism Alliance

Culinary Tourism Alliance

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In an increasingly globalized world, why do we continue to associate tacos with Mexico, risotto with Italy, and wontons with China?

Although we can find these foods in markets and restaurants around the world, many people travel great distances to try these dishes at their source. The history of food and drink is often regional, with dishes innately tied to local history, culture, and the landscape. Tacos, risotto, and wontons are about more than the ingredients that go into them –– they’re a manifestation of regional foodways.

The term “foodways” describes how food, culture, and history connect. Foodways help us better understand how ingredients and dishes relate to the heritage and traditions of a specific area or people. Put simply, foodways are the who, what, where, when, why, and how of food and drink. Understanding foodways allows us to tell meaningful stories about what we eat and drink and why it matters.

For visitors, the stories behind regional dishes are more than just interesting anecdotes. They provide a glimpse into local culture and make eating experiences more meaningful.

A sandwich becomes a lot more interesting to a traveler when he or she finds out that the bread flour came from a 100-year old mill down the street. And a bowl of vindaloo curry in Goa becomes way more satisfying when it’s made during an impromptu cooking class by a traveler at his or her homestay.

Foodways are dynamic. They change in relation to social, economic, and environmental conditions. Italy’s relationship with the tomato is a great example of how foodways build a region’s story. Although originally from South America, tomatoes today are associated with Italian cuisine through dishes like caprese salad and pasta bolognese. When Europeans were first introduced to the tomato, it was considered poisonous, so many people refused to eat them. Over time the tomato became a staple for Italian cooks –– and through multiple waves of emigration, Italy’s tomato-based recipes traveled across the world and were adapted many times over.

It’s also important to consider the evolution of recipes when exploring a region’s foodways. Think of an Indian restaurant in Washington. Perhaps they offer a local blueberry lassi alongside the traditional mango variety. It’s a cultural fusion that reflects the influence of local ingredients on traditional recipes.

Although local food and drink can play a key role in defining the foodways of an area, local sourcing is not essential to food tourism development. Instead, showcasing personal or regional foodways is what’s important.

For travelers with an interest in foodways, food is more than sustenance. It’s a way of understanding a place. Showcasing foodways through storytelling is important for communicating tastes of place to visitors. When a menu explains a restaurant’s family connection to the dishes they offer, it illustrates personal food journeys and makes the visitor experience more meaningful.

Helping communities identify and leverage their foodways is central to our approach at Grow Food Tourism. Foodways can often be so ingrained in everyday life that many people find it difficult to notice the unique food and drink offerings in their community. Berry picking, community suppers, farmers’ markets, and shore lunches all offer the interactive experiences that today’s travelers seek.

Even in our globalized world, there are unique food and drink experiences that can only be enjoyed in specific places. By unearthing your destination’s foodways, you can identify tastes of place that will position it as somewhere with distinct and memorable food tourism experiences.

For more information about how you can use foodways to grow food tourism in your destination, visit growfoodtourism.com .

This content is created in partnership between SkiftX and Culinary Tourism Alliance . If you’d like to see more content like this please subscribe to our Skift Table Newsletter .

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The Oxford Handbook of Food History

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22 Culinary Tourism

Lucy M. Long (Ph.D., Folklore, University of Pennsylvania) runs a nonprofit Center for Food and Culture and teaches food studies at Bowling Green State University in the tourism and American culture studies programs. She is the author of Culinary Tourism: Eating and Otherness (2003) and Regional American Food Culture (2009) and has published on a wide range of topics connected to food, ranging from Appalachian food and music to Irish soda bread to Korean restaurants.

  • Published: 21 November 2012
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A product of both world history and contemporary mass culture, culinary tourism is a scholarly field of study that is emerging as an important part of the tourism industry. Also known as gastronomic tourism, tasting tourism, and simply food tourism, culinary tourism refers to adventurous eating, eating out of curiosity, exploring other cultures through food, intentionally participating in the foodways of an Other, and the development of food as a tourist destination and attraction. In culinary tourism, the primary motivation for travel is to experience a specific food. Culinary tourism parallels the globalization of food production and consumption and reflects issues inherent in tourism. It has the potential to address some of the controversial issues in tourism in general, such as questions of authenticity, commodification of tradition, identity construction, intellectual property and intangible heritage, as well as the ecological, economic, and cultural sustainability of food cultures in response to tourism.

Culinary tourism is both a scholarly field of study and a growing trend within the tourism industry. It is defined as adventurous eating, eating out of curiosity, exploring other cultures through food, intentionally participating in the foodways of an “other,” and developing food as tourist destination and attraction. 1 Also referred to as gastronomic tourism, tasting tourism, and simply food tourism, it is seen as tourism in which experiencing a specific food is the primary motivation for travel. 2

This essay offers an overview of these perspectives, using a folkloristic framework for understanding tourist behaviors as a way a balancing the exotic and the familiar. A product of both world history and contemporary mass culture, culinary tourism reflects the globalization of food production and consumption as well as issues surrounding tourism in general. Questions of authenticity, commodification of tradition, identity construction, intellectual property, and intangible heritage, and the ecological, economic, and cultural sustainability of food cultures in response to tourism are hotly debated. In some minds, culinary tourism offers solutions to some of these issues by suggesting a framework for exploring other people’s connections to food, as well as offering strategies to insure cultural, economic, and ecological sustainability. 3

Origins of Culinary Tourism: Eating out of Curiosity

People have always eaten food out of curiosity, both for sustenance and to explore new tastes. Food scholar Fabio Parasecoli quotes sociologist Claude Fischler and psychologist Paul Rozin in describing two conflicting impulses that have propelled the development of new foods and new cuisines: neophilia , “the curiosity to try new food, based in humans’ omnivorous nature,” and neophobia , “the concurrent fear of being poisoned.” 4 Such curiosity has been a driving force in the history of food, introducing new ingredients, recipes, preparation methods, and cooking styles. Culinary tourism suggests the process by which novelty is incorporated into a food culture by the movement from exotic to edible to familiar and finally to palatable. New foods are perceived as strange and different (exotic) and possibly not edible. Once they are perceived as an item that can be eaten (familiar), then evaluations of its tastiness can be made. Chinese food in the United States, for example, was initially seen as too exotic to be considered food when first experienced by California gold rush miners in the mid-1800s. Once Americans got used to the idea of eating it, it became a part of their familiar “culinary universe,” and taste preferences might then determine their choice of consuming it, rather than fear that it was too unknown. Similarly, restaurant owners might then add something exotic in order to stir curiosity again. This may explain the common pattern seen in the United States in which Cantonese-style Chinese restaurants are first accepted, then are followed in some areas by restaurants offering various regional styles of Chinese food. Donna Gabaccia makes cross-ethnic dining central to her interpretation of American food in We Are What We Eat (1998). 5

World historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto suggests a similarly long view of culinary tourism in his book Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food (2002). He identifies eight “revolutions,” or paradigmatic shifts in the ways humans use and think about food, including the rise of agriculture and herding, the development of cooking and manners, and long-distance trade and industrialization. These transitions are not successive chronological periods, but tend to overlap, survive in pockets of populations, and leave behind vestiges of each stage. His history suggests that “eating out of curiosity/exploratory eating” has always occurred but in different manners and with different meanings. In the eighth and final phase, the postindustrial, Fernández-Armesto helps to explain the emergence of culinary tourism as an intentional exploration of the “other” for the purpose of pleasure and satisfying curiosity. This phase is characterized by “the internationalization of the palate and the rise of fusion cookery reflect[ing] multiculturalism.” 6

The industrial world offered new mobility to people to cross cultural boundaries—both voluntarily for pleasure, education, or commerce and involuntarily for safety, health, lifestyle, or occupational opportunities. This has literally brought together individuals from different backgrounds to living in close proximity and sharing their everyday lives, including their foodways. We smell our neighbors’ dinner cooking; we see new vegetables in the supermarkets; we visit restaurants serving cuisines completely foreign to us—these all make us curious about things we might not have known even existed before. Geographer David Harvey characterizes the state of the modern world, particularly since the 1950s, as one of “space-time compression.” 7 Food cultures are also compressed in the sense that many of us (particularly in the United States) now have access to ingredients, dishes, cooking styles, and food philosophies from across the world. Although literature and travel writing might have piqued our curiosity before, we can now actually satisfy that curiosity and experience these new foods. This intentional mixing of ingredients and styles has created numerous fusion dishes and even cuisines. Simultaneously, hybrid dishes have emerged from expediency (cost, availability, ease of preparation) that then may become the focus of curiosity. Reactions against industrialization could also encourage culinary experimentation, particularly with foods that were seen as more authentic and natural. The countercultural revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s saw an openness to new cultures and new experiences as well as a celebration of diversity and nonconformity, all of which helped open up peoples’ palates to new tastes. 8

Eating out of curiosity now occurs in a wide variety of forms—commercial and public as well as informal and private. They also include educational explorations into other cultures and places as well as pleasurable excursions into new tastes. Contemporary global culture encourages adventurous eating, and numerous new products featuring “exotic” foods are being marketing in grocery stores and restaurants.

Cookbooks and other culinary literature could perhaps be seen as the first virtual media for culinary tourism, offering readers a window into other people’s food. Although these were originally meant to function as primers for cooking skills and housewifery, they also offered vicarious eating, enabling readers to imagine new tastes. Many cookbooks today include portraits of the culture surrounding the recipes, giving histories, biographies, maps, and luscious photographs that whet the appetite. Cookbooks featuring regional food traditions are particularly popular throughout the United States and Europe. Even though many of these present gourmet updates of traditional recipes or innovative recipes using local ingredients, they also reflect a shift toward looking inward to explore the complexities within a nation, as well as a concern with place as significant to human experience. Food writing moved in the early 1990s from reviewing restaurants to exploring the pleasures of new foods and new cuisines, as well as accounts of travels for and with food. Today, food periodicals frequently feature exotic (or at least, new) foods and ingredients, along with new ways of cooking and serving food. For example, the cover of the January 2007 issue of Food and Wine heralds “100 tastes you must try in 2007.” Even non–food-centered periodicals often include foods or eating experiences based on culinary curiosity. During the 2008 Beijing Olympics, a major fashion magazine included an article in which the author describes how “after a few wrong turns, [he] finds his way to some of China’s most delicious, authentic, and innovative cuisine—and the perfect roast duck.” 9

New media have also been primary venues for satisfying one’s curiosity about food. Televised cooking shows, like cookery books, opened new culinary worlds for thousands of people who would never be able to travel to experience those foods. Julia Child, though not the first television chef, broke new ground in 1963 with the premier of her program, The French Chef , in which she showed American housewives how to “tame” gourmet French cooking. Cooking shows, though popular, tended to remain the domain of day-time programming for stay-at-home adults (wives, particularly) until the Food Network was established in 1993. This brought new foods and cuisines into the home and helped transform the perception of cooking from a domestic chore into a culinary art. By 2004, cooking shows were wildly popular among all ages and genders, and the Food Network created shows dedicated to exploring new and exotic foods. One of the most popular culinary adventure shows was Anthony Bourdain’s A Cook’s Tour , which aired in 2001 and 2002, and visited locales ranging from Tokyo and Southeast Asia, to Portugal and the Basque region of Spain, Mexico, Kansas City, Brazil, and Australia.

Films, like television, have always included food and eating as part of the setting for action and as metaphors for characters’ emotions and relationships. My Dinner with Andre (1981), for example, consisted entirely of two characters talking over a meal. Films that focused on food preparation and consumption, though, tended to be rare, and even in the 2010, there are a limited number that actually center action and character development around food. Babette’s Feast , (1987), about a woman who cooks for a Danish community of ascetics, has inspired adventuresome home cooks to recreate her nineteenth-century Parisian banquet. Another film that uses eating our of curiosity as a theme is Sideways (2004), an American comedy in which two middle-aged men travel through California’s wine country, exploring possibilities in their own lives as they explore wine and fine dining. Numerous other films have stirred audiences’ curiosity about food and cooking, most notably, Big Night (1996), Eat, Drink, Man, Woman (1994), and the award winning, Julie and Julia (2009).

Also riding this wave is an emerging genre of literature made up of memoirs and fiction based on exploring food. Memoirs, in particular, have become popular and usually use food as a tangible way to organize and make sense of memories. Often set as an exploration of food in a new place, this exploration is a metaphor for discovery of the self. Some of the most influential ones include, M. F. K. Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me (1989), Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence (1991), and Ruth Reichl’s Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table (1998) and Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table (2001). Of particular relevance to culinary tourism is Jeffrey Steingarten’s The Man Who Ate Everything (1997), in which the author, food critic for Vogue magazine, sets out to taste and learn about foods that he disliked. Even though he does not acquire a liking for them, he eats them out of curiosity, a sense of adventure, and an exploration of his own culinary universe. More recently, Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (2007) explores a year of living off of locally produced food in the Virginia mountains, tapping into more recent concerns about connecting one’s food to environmental and community sustainability. A similar thread in many of these memoirs is a search for identity, family, and community through food. An excellent example is food scholar and writer Laura Schenone’s The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken: A Search for Food and Family (2008), in which a desire to learn to make ravioli like her grandmother did takes the author on a culinary tour through Italy—and a discovery of herself.

Restaurants, cooking classes, and folklife festivals also cater to the search for new culinary pleasures. Eating out in the United States has become much more common today, not just for special occasions but also for nourishment, and is a major source of entertainment. As palates become more cosmopolitan, restaurants offer more and more tastes, oftentimes adding dishes from a variety of culinary cultures to the menus. A brochure for an exclusive restaurant in the Washington, D.C. area, for example, boldly claims: “Tour the world’s finest cuisines, presented with flair and accompanied by premium spirits and wines.” As our tastes have broadened, cooking classes and “tasting” events have become popular. Classes in the United States may still focus on culinary skills drawn from French cooking, but many now focus on learning techniques and styles from cultures across the globe. These often teach iconic dishes (Chinese stir fry, Japanese sushi, Thai noodles) that have become popular through the restaurant scene so that they can be reproduced at home. Since food is a window into culture, eating out of curiosity can also be a way of exploring the culture surrounding a food. Educators, museums, and other cultural institutions and culture scholars have long used food to introduce belief systems, aesthetics, lifestyles, and traditions of other cultures. For example, the Smithsonian Institution’s annual Folklife Festival includes foodways as an integral part of every cultural group presented at the festival. Many people come because they are curious about particular foods, and leave with an understanding that food is a much more complex—and richer—topic than they realized.

Food in the Tourism Industry

The tourism industry was slow to recognize the potential of food as an attraction and destination, treating it instead as one part of “hospitality services.” This is understandable, however, if we define tourism as travel for pleasure, and realize that the hardships and dangers early travelers had to endure rarely made it a pleasurable experience. A number of cultures have traditions of people traveling to places specifically to eat the food produced there. Northern Spain, for example, is famous for the varieties of beans associated with each village, and knowledgeable eaters travel to restaurants in those regions serving specialty dishes made from those beans. Consumers insist that the beans taste differently if transported elsewhere, and that a full appreciation of them requires consuming them in situ, in the place they are grown. Wine, similarly, has attracted consumers who want to sample the wine in its place of origin and production. Such travels can perhaps more accurately be called food pilgrimages since they include an element of seeking the authentic as an almost sacred quest for knowledge and personal transformation. 10

The countries most associated with both domestic and international culinary tourism are France, Italy, and Spain. All have highly developed cuisines, as well as native populations that are knowledgeable and willing to travel within their own countries for food experiences. They also boast historical and contemporary cultures of wine consumption, often tied to strong family traditions of vineyards and vintners. Today, Australia, New Zealand, China, Thailand, and Singapore have become major food destinations. Canada and the United States are also vying for their share of the tourism market. In most cases, wine tourism is leading the way in the tourism industry bringing in tourists usually willing and able to pay for higher-priced hospitality services. This has encouraged the development of fine-dining, gourmet food establishments, and, in some instances, is forming the basis for the emergence of new cuisines—for example, the Niagara region of Canada, Southern Appalachia in the United States, and the New Global Cuisine based in Hong Kong. 11

Individual businesses within the tourism industry are developing products in response to recognizing this interest. Wineries and restaurants, for example, began promoting themselves as tourist destinations, often adding overnight accommodations for guests. In the early 2000s, travel companies began including food as a focus, offering tours to famous restaurants or to eating experiences in regions well known for their food, and in the 2000s, businesses emerged that focused on culinary tours. With names such as Culinary Adventures, The Globetrotting Gourmet, Crete’s Culinary Sanctuaries, and A Cook’s Tour, these companies are obviously focusing on food as a destination. Guidebooks and travel brochures are also emphasizing food. For example, the Lonely Planet—World Food series is specifically “for people who live to eat, drink and travel with local recipes and culinary dictionary.” 12 These include maps, photos, recipes, and cultural and historical context so that readers can explore the food culture knowledgeably and respectfully.

New Zealand, Australia, Great Britain, and Canada have led the way in establishing culinary tourism within the tourism industry, and have tied industry developments with scholarly research and assessment on the subject. Each nation has established its own organizations overseeing culinary tourism. The United States has been slower to recognize food’s potential, and has tended to focus more on the business and management side with less attention to cultural issues. For example, the International Culinary Tourism Association, based in Oregon, focuses on strategies for creating and marketing products and offers expensive certification programs for members. 13

Although tourism initiatives are becoming more aware of the potential for everyday foods to attract visitors, their emphasis is primarily on fine-dining, innovative foods that deliver satisfying taste experiences and justify tourist expenditures. Any food associated with a place, however, can become the focus of culinary tourism, for example, maple syrup in New England, beef in Argentina, lobster in Maine, crawfish in Louisiana, or grits in the Southern United States. Some cities become associated with particular foods—Cincinnati chili, Kansas City or Memphis barbecue, Boston baked beans, Philadelphia cheese steak—and are using those foods in their tourism marketing. Tourists frequently intentionally eat those foods in order to better “experience the place,” and restaurants catering to tourists frequently market the foods in that way. Iconic foods are also featured on tourist souvenirs such as clothing, key chains, and other trinkets.

Culinary tourism is closely related to other varieties of tourism. It can be included under cultural tourism, in which tourists travel to experience another culture. In these instances, food is used as a way to discover everyday life as well as to share a sense of community with members of that culture (or with the tour group). Festivals often offer sites for cultural tourism, presenting specialty dishes intentionally selected to represent a cuisine. Also closely related is agritourism, which consists of farm tours, possibly observing or participating in farm activities, such as milking cows or harvesting a crop, or tours of food processing and manufacturing establishments, such as canneries, cheese making, or factories. For obvious reasons, agritourism tends to focus on rural areas, while culinary tourism is frequently urban with access to restaurants.

Heritage tourism is also relevant to culinary tourism. Living history museums, notably Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia and Plimouth Plantation in Massachusetts, often allow for the exploration of foodways of the past with demonstrations of food preparation. Interpreters may give explanations along with such activities as cutting apples, baking bread, or working in the garden. In some venues, visitors are given the opportunity to participate or to at least taste some of the results. Extreme tourism, in which tourists test boundaries of safety or social and cultural appropriateness, sometimes includes food, involving ingredients not usually considered “normal” or edible in the tourist’s home culture. Ecotourism, in which the focus is on exploring the natural environment without damaging it, can be related to culinary tourism by including meals utilizing locally produced and organic foods. Culinary tourism is also frequently now tied to sustainable tourism, offering a way to keep money in host communities, provide employment to local residents, and teach understanding of the culture among tourists. Later I will discuss the ways it attempts to resolve the twin challenges of tourism: competitiveness and endurance of resources.

Culinary Tourism—Scholarly Literature

Scholarship on the intersection of tourism and food is surprisingly recent, with the late 1990s and early 2000s marking the publication of most foundational studies. Research initially divided into two strands. The first was humanities-based, using qualitative, ethnographic research that explored both food and tourism as socio-cultural constructions. The focus tended to be the meanings and impacts of those constructions. The second strand was an applied one, using social science, business, and marketing models with quantitative methods to clarify and resolve issues surrounding food within the tourism industry. Although these two strands still exist, sometimes in opposition to each other, tourism scholars and individuals working within the industry (particularly outside the United States, notably in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Great Britain) have recently recognized the need to bridge the two. Research on sustainable tourism tends to merge the two approaches.

Geographer Wilbur Zelinsky was perhaps the first scholar to discuss the concept, which he termed “gastronomic tourism.” In a 1985 article, he used a novel quantitative method of surveying telephone book listings of ethnic restaurants to map culinary regions in the United States and Canada. His research was concerned with explaining the prevalence of particular ethnic groups as restaurateurs. 14 Nevertheless, a number of scholars within the humanities picked up on the term and sought to explore the meanings of “eating the other.” 15 For example, a cultural studies dissertation by Jay Ann Cox examined Mexican foods in an Arizona folklife festival as well as the stereotypes presented in salsa advertisements. 16   Consuming Geographies: We Are Where We Eat, by David Bell and Gill Valentine, offers excellent summaries and critiques of various theories and publications. They use the phrase “kitchen table tourism” to refer to the possibilities offered by modern technology (specifically, the Internet) for vicariously experiencing other food cultures. Their chapter on the global explores numerous issues involved in culinary tourism from a cultural geography perspective. 17 Another excellent discussion of these issues is provided by cultural studies scholars Bob Ashley, Joanne Hollows, Steve Jones, and Ben Taylor in their important food studies text, Food and Cultural Studies . Among other things, they address the application of Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of social distinction as an explanation for the modern trend in acquiring knowledge of the culinary other as cultural capital to assert identity and class difference. They point out that multiple interpretations should be recognized, and that consuming the other is tied to numerous cultural processes. Their delineation of five of those offers a useful model for research: production, regulation, representation, identity, and consumption. 18

Zilenski’s work on restaurants established those institutions as significant sites for food and tourism. Numerous publications touch on this intersection without referring specifically to tourism, and my own formulation of culinary tourism grew out of research on Korean restaurants in the United States. 19 The edited volume by anthropologists David Beriss and David Sutton, The Restaurants Book: Ethnographies of Where We Eat , also uses restaurants as the “ideal postmodern institutions” for exploring the many challenges facing us today, including tourism. 20

I first used the term “culinary tourism” in 1996 conference papers at the Association for the Study of Food and Society and the American Folklore Society. The favorable reception by colleagues led to a journal article in 1998, and an edited volume, Culinary Tourism: Eating and Otherness , in which I offered a framework for broadening our understandings of both tourism and food as cultural, social, and personal constructions. My definition of culinary tourism draws from folklore, sociolinguistics, cultural anthropology, and philosophy of aesthetics: “the intentional, exploratory participation in the foodways of an other—participation including the consumption, preparation, and presentation of a food item, cuisine, meal system, or eating style considered to belong to a culinary system not one’s own.” From this perspective, culinary tourism deals with the negotiation of exotic and familiar foods by individuals—tourists as well as producers. Foods have to be different enough to elicit curiosity, but familiar enough to be considered edible. Also, exoticness or “otherness” is a matter of personal perspective involving multiple factors. Culture, ethnicity, region, time (past, future, and festive), ethos or religion, socioeconomic class, gender, and age can all offer foods that are different for an eater. For example, kosher foods might be exotic for non-Jews; alcohol for under-age teenagers; stews cooked in an iron kettle over an open fire for modern day eaters; vegetarian foods for an omnivore; quiche for “real men.”

This approach to otherness expands the possibilities of what foods are available for tourism. I adapt John Urry’s “tourist gaze” 21 as a way of seeing the potential exoticness in common, everyday foods, moving beyond gourmet dishes to recognizing the potential meaningfulness of the everyday—“exoticizing the familiar.” My model for culinary tourism also shifts the focus from food (the product that is consumed) to foodways, the total network of activities surrounding food and eating. This network includes procurement, preservation, preparation, presentation, consumption styles, contexts for eating, cleaning up, conceptualizations about food, and symbolic performances. Individuals attach different meanings to foods partly because they have different memories associated with these components. For example, a fish caught in the local river during a family vacation might be the same product as one shipped in from a commercial distributor, but it carries memories of people and events that give it different emotional weights. The model also suggests that venues for tourism extend beyond the usual sites for consumption of food to include a variety of venues, both virtual and “real”: cookbooks, cookware shops and catalogues, grocery stores, films, literature, television cooking shows, advertising, festivals, farms, classes, and so on. The folkloristic approach to culinary tourism recognizes that aesthetic and sensory memories shape individual’s responses to new experiences, and that individuals constantly reconstruct their perceptions of identity, community, and culture.

Culturally grounded food studies scholars also began addressing culinary tourism in the mid-1990s. The 11th conference on The International Commission for Ethnological Food Research held in Cyprus in 1996 focused on the role of colonization in culinary tourism as well as connections between migrations, immigrations, and the geographic distribution of particular foods and foodways. The proceedings were published in 1998, edited by Irish folklorist Patricia Lysaght, and articles provide historical as well as ethnographic perspectives. A more recent exploration of these issues can be found in a special issue of Food, Culture and Society , titled “Food Journeys: Culinary Travels in Time and Space.” Articles in this volume explore “a wider range of temporal and figurative journeys,” using travel “as a metaphor for reflection, memory, exchange and otherness.” They utilize a critical theory approach recognizing that “accounts of eating practices therefore have an intimate and intricate relationship with colonial discourse, and with differential power relations in general.” 22 In this publication, Kaori O’Connor analyzes food as not only a central tourist attraction but also a metaphor for the tourist identity that has developed around Hawaii, while Daisy Tam uses Bourdieu to develop a theory of Slow Food that actually centers the self as part of a system with responsibility to the rest of that system, a positioning that forces individuals to look outward and that holds the possibility for culinary tourism to enable positive shifts in human’s relationships to others. 23

Meanwhile, scholarship within tourism studies began addressing food as an attraction and destination in the mid-1990s. Scholars in the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand defined food tourism as a particular genre of tourism having as its primary motivation “the desire to experience a particular type of food or the produce of a specific region.” 24 This definition was later expanded to include “visitation to primary and secondary food producers, food festivals, restaurants and specific locations for which food tasting and/or experiencing the attribute of specialist food production regions are the primary motivating factor for travel.” 25 Thus, a volume on wine tourism offered a cross-disciplinary perspective drawing from business, social science, and policy approaches. A 2003 work, Food Tourism Around the World , also edited by Hall and Sharples, explored motivations, models, and implications for culinary identity as well as regional economic development. The book offers management and marketing perspectives but also recognize the role of culture as a useful tool for marketing. The authors also focus on location as significant to food tourism, stating that even though it can be “exported” it still retains a spatial fixity: “The tourists must go to the location of production in order to consume the local fare and become food tourists.” 26 This conclusion differs from the humanities approach in which individuals can explore other foods through a variety of venues without actually traveling away from home.

Another influential volume, Tourism and Gastronomy (2002), edited by Anne-Mette Hjalager and Greg Richards, examines gastronomic tourism as a force for economic development and cultural transformation. Authors discuss issues such as the potential for gastronomy and tourism to serve as radical, activist disciplines, the importance of intellectual property, regional and national identities, and the connections between globalization and localization. The editors conclude by pointing out that tourism and gastronomy are both emerging disciplines with similar dichotomies in practice from small-scale, artisanal production to industrial mass production. They also call upon globalization to be interpreted as a potentially beneficial force, noting that fears of it fail to recognize the dynamic character of both gastronomy and tourism. Portugal’s protectionist stance toward globalization has, in their opinion, stifled the local food culture. By contrast, Spain’s ability to develop brand names for regional cuisines not only allows for more creativity but is also more realistic.

In another formative publication, Priscilla Boniface has sought to explain why food and drink have recently become attractions in their own right, placing the question in historical context as well as a contemporary reaction to industrialization, modernity, and globalization. She suggests that this shift represents more than just the discovery of a new niche in tourism. It is a shift in the culture of tourism itself, implying that tourism is no longer based on a separation from the quotidian, but instead a blending between holiday and the everyday. Taking a cultural perspective on “tasting tourism,” Boniface recognizes that culture drives tourism, which in turn provides a medium through which society works out issues of identity and power. Building upon the ideas of cultural critic Henri Lefebvre, who emphasized the disconnection of modern man to his modes of production and even consumption, Boniface sees food tourism as a seeking of authentic experiences through food—resulting from the peculiarities of modern life. Boniface raises the possibility, though, that this very modernity is what makes us recognize and appreciate the past, the rural, and the non-industrialized. Finally, she identifies five “driving forces” acting as motivations for food tourism: anxieties over food safety and social uncertainty; a need to show distinction, affluence and individualism; curiosity and wish for knowledge and discovery; the need to feel grounded amid globalization; and the requirement for sensory and tactile pleasure. Her work is particularly useful for humanities scholars of culinary tourism who are exploring the constructions of the meanings of culinary tourism. 27

The publications mentioned previously emphasize the positive opportunities offered by recognizing food in tourism, but a 2004 article by Erik Cohen and Nir Avieli points out that food can also be an obstacle to tourism. In this useful assessment of the state of food tourism both as an industry and a field of scholarship, they observe that unpleasant food experiences can lead to cultural misunderstandings and that the use of food as an attraction can actually have harmful effects on the host culture. 28 By 2010, scholarship in tourism recognizes culinary tourism not only as a significant industry trend but also as a subject crucial for understanding the implications of tourist productions and behaviors.

Many of the issues surrounding culinary tourism concern tourism in general. Although food presents some unique challenges, it also offers a medium for exploring these issues. Because it is so multifaceted and easily holds a variety of meanings simultaneously, food helps in understanding the complexities of tourism as both a human impulse and an industry building upon that impulse. This section first addresses some of the common criticisms of tourism and then explores the two biggest challenges facing culinary tourism in the future: competitiveness and sustainability.

One of the most fundamental criticisms is that tourism is categorically a colonialist enterprise in which individuals with power and wealth exploit other cultures for their own pleasure, entertainment, or edification. That exploitation means that individual members of other cultures are stripped of their personhood and perceived as less than the tourist. Similarly, tourism puts “others” on display, turning them into an object to be looked upon. This issue in culinary tourism translates into asking what it means to eat an “other,” a food perceived to be exotic or somehow different from one’s own food culture. Eating does not necessarily lead to understanding or respect for that culture. 29 My formulation of culinary tourism as a means of developing an experiential understanding of the humanity of others also addresses this concern. By approaching food, a basic and universal need, as a cultural, social, and personal construction, we can identify our commonalities as well as the logic behind our differences. 30

Philosopher, Lisa Heldke, addresses the colonialist issue in her book, Exotic Appetites: Ruminations of a Food Adventurer (2003). She points out that eating other cuisines poses a philosophical dilemma. On one hand, it represents imperialism in that it is only with wealth that we are able to experiment with food. But, she continues, “for me to decide to eat only foods of my own ethnicity is to close my doors, not to allow any foreign influence in. It is also a decision to impoverish my life by remaining ignorant of other cultures.” Her answer is to continually question ourselves—our motivations, our responses, our attitudes and relationships to that food and the people behind them: “we cannot eat just once and be done with it. The meanings of our actions do not remain constant, but shift and change with the changes in their context.” This consciousness allows us to become “anticolonialist food adventurers.” 31

A recent trend in culinary tourism initiatives may reflect a shift in attitude among tourists that reflects awareness Heldke encourages. Cooking classes and educational culinary tours turn tourists into students of that culture. Although these types of activities tend to be high-priced, and the knowledge these tourists gain might be for their own enhancement “back home,” they are acting in a way that reverses the typical host-tourist relationship. In this case, the host has knowledge and skills that the guests want and respect, and many individuals involved in such tourism feel that it creates a more equitable relationship than the usual tourism one. To describe this particular attitude of respect, even reverence, for the food of an “other,” I have suggested the term “food pilgrimage.” Individuals on food pilgrimages seek original contexts in which to experience a food cultural as authentically as possible. Seeing the food “in situ” offers the opportunity to understand it as a whole system connected to a specific time, place, and people. Such tours can lead to a “transcendent” experience with food, and food “pilgrims” often feel that they have undergone a positive transformation in some way.

Another major criticism of tourism is that it leads to a weakening of cultural identity, that, by putting a culture on display as part of a tourist attraction, that culture becomes a commodity, and identity becomes little more than a brand name. Proponents of tourism, however, point out that individuals frequently become more aware of their identity through tourist activities. Furthermore, if tourists are respectful of that identity and show an appreciation for it, they can actually encourage pride and a desire to preserve identity. Kevin Meethan, for example, states that tourism actually reinforces “locality, or the specificity of places and cultures.” 32 Since foodways are an expression of identity, culinary tourism offers an especially potent means of affirming that identity. George Ritzer’s work on McDonaldization asserts that globalization has often stimulated local cuisine rather than stifled it, and Richard Wilk observes that tourism in Belize has recently encouraged the development of a Belizean cuisine. 33

These positive interpretations of tourism make sense if we think of “differential identity” as identities constructed out of contrast with another identity. The differences between cultures help us identify what characterizes them, and which of those characteristics are significant. Culinary tourism plays a role in this process by emphasizing the unique foodways of a culture. This happens on a variety of levels. Regional identities based on real or imagined attachments to a geographic space can actually be recognized as well as constructed through food. Barbecue has become iconic of the American South, and scholars are now demonstrating that variations in barbecue meats and sauces reflect regional differences within that larger region. 34 Food can also offer a commonality around which individuals can feel a sense of attachment to a place, so that consuming that food becomes a symbolic means of acting upon that attachment. Clambakes in New England often serve that purpose as well as others. 35 Furthermore, food is also being used to develop a definition of a region. A new cuisine is developing in Southern Appalachia, for example, that features local produce and foods from nature—mountain trout, blackberries, morels. In order to appeal to culinary tourists, these foods are sometimes “fancied up” and removed from their cultural histories. Grits, for example, might be referred to as “Appalachia polenta,” or “traditional” foods such as fried green tomatoes and ripened tomato slices are paired with fresh mozzarella and basil leaves. 36

Ethnic identities have also been constructed and affirmed through culinary tourism. Restaurants, festivals, church fairs, and cookbooks all offer venues for culinary tourists to experience these foods. 37 Tourism also allows for ethnic identity to be situational, a highlighting of that identity rather than others also held by the hosts. For example a Middle-Eastern restaurant in Detroit where there is a large population of Lebanese-Americans, might be run by family who has lived in the United States for several generations and intermarried with non-Lebanese, but for purposes of the restaurant, they highlight their Lebanese ancestry. Similarly, since Korean food was slow to be accepted in the United States outside major cities on the east and west coasts, many Koreans highlighted their Asian heritage and opened restaurants serving Chinese or Japanese foods. There are numerous other examples of ethnic foods that were initially exotic tourist items that have become familiar and accepted within mainstream food culture and have perhaps then led to both a recognition of that ethnicity and further exploration of that cuisine—Italian pizza, Mexican tacos, Spanish tapas, Chinese chop suey and chow mein, Thai pad thai, and so on.

The adaption of foods for culinary tourism reflects another frequent criticism of tourism in general, that it manipulates cultural traditions, commodifying and “trinketizing” (turning them into trivial souvenir objects), stripping them of their original meanings and cultural power. Also, as a force in globalization, tourism is correspondingly leading to homogenization of cultural differences. Since many tourists seek familiar foods when they travel, popular restaurant chains have been established throughout the world, in some cases supplanting local food practices and spawning local imitations. Some scholars have challenged the interpretation that this leads to homogeneity. James Watson, for example, has demonstrated that McDonald’s in Asian countries are given culturally specific meanings and functions by local residents. 38

Culinary tourism can actually be a force in encouraging both globalization and the affirmation and preservation of local foods since such tourists actively seek foods different from their familiar ones. Tourists can provide practical incentives for maintaining culinary traditions by creating markets for them. This leads to “tourist cuisines or dishes,” that are either inventions of new dishes or adaptations of traditional ones in order accommodate tourist tastes and expectations. For example, restaurants in southern Appalachia now offer updated versions of traditional foods such as grits and cornbread, using organic or exotic ingredients. Similarly, chefs in Singapore have developed a new fusion cuisine specifically in response to tourists. Emphasis also tends to be on celebratory foods rather than common, everyday ones since these are often considered more distinctive, tastier, and higher priced. This can then dilute the meanings of that food. The luau in Hawaii, for example, has become a tourist production with stereotypical foods, shifting from the sacred meanings held within the community to simply a party and feast for the tourists. 39

The tendency to adapt foods for tourists raises questions about authenticity, a quality felt by some tourism scholars to be a primary motivation for many tourists. 40 Authenticity, however, presupposes that there exists an original, pure version of a food culture that has remained static and free of outside influences. Recognition of the dynamic nature of culture in general has led instead to questions concerning how to define a food culture, how to preserve it without also stifling it, and ownership of it.

Food is now recognized as intangible heritage and, as such, can be protected under international law. UNESCO includes it as part of cultural heritage. Preservation of this heritage, however, is very complex, as seen in the example of a town in Italy, Lucca, which attempted to ban all ethnic foods in restaurants in order to preserve their local specialties. Critics pointed out that the cuisine they were trying to protect had itself been developed from “foreign” foods originally (tomatoes, for example). Also, some local residents protested, saying that they wanted to be able to be innovative and creative in their food preparation and consumption. Again, the role of tourism was seen in this discussion as both an affirmation of the food heritage and a threat to it.

Food is also now recognized as intellectual property, meaning that ownership is being contested for cuisines, recipes, cooking styles, and even ingredients. Geographical indicators are used in many countries to designate the accurate origin of a food product, beginning with France, which established the Appellation d’ Origine Controllee in the early 1900s to protect cheeses and wines. This is based on the older concept of terroir (“taste of place”) and allows regions to claim certain types of produce as belonging to them. An arm of the government also sets standards by which any produce from a designated region can carry an AOC stamp of approval. Such geographical indicators directly benefit and are benefited by the culinary tourism industry in that they guarantee quality and authenticity. Tourism marketing then tends to treat them as a brand by which products can be known.

Many scholars of tourism now call for a more nuanced view of tourism that acknowledges these criticisms but also recognizes that tourism can offer both benefits and costs to all participants involved either directly or indirectly. Participants include tourists (guests), the host community, the government of the host community, the tourism suppliers or businesses connected to supply, and the natural environment. Each participant has their own perspective, so that what benefits one may be a cost or harmful to another. To further complicate matters, definitions of success might differ according to each perspective. As tourism scholar, Erve Chambers notes, tourism is complex, involving numerous players who construct their own meanings from tourist activities. 41 Although, more powerful nations and individuals have the opportunity to develop infrastructures and financial capital for a tourism industry, these “contradictions of tourism” exist regardless of who the tourist is.

These concerns are being addressed in the field of sustainable tourism, which argues that by carefully managing the resources for tourism (local economies, ecologies, and cultures) the tourism industry will not only help those resources endure but will also sustain itself. Culinary tourism offers a potentially powerful tool for sustainability. Similar to Slow Food’s vision of promoting food that is “good, clean, and fair,” it can encourage culinary “destinations” and “attractions” that are locally produced with environmentally friendly methods, and provide employment for members of the host culture. An issue arises from the culinary tourism industry’s frequent focus on gourmet ingredients or preparation methods appealing to elite, high-paying customers. In order to be competitive in the tourism marketplace, businesses need to offer something that is distinctive and unique and also has the highest margin between profit and production possible. This can mean that producers (chefs, farmers, restaurant managers) are brought in from outside the local culture, sometimes creating “leakage” (profits leave the host community) and culturally unsustainable products. For example, a gourmet restaurant in a small, culinarily conservative town, might bring in the occasional outside customer but not appeal to local eaters. Rather than creating an appreciation for local food culture, the tourism actually dismisses it. The folkloristic approach to culinary tourism attempts to counteract this possibility by promoting an understanding of the host culture’s cultural history, placing their food traditions within that history, and presenting them in ways that emphasize their local meanings. The Bowling Green Culinary Tourism Trail is a successful example of this “exoticizing the familiar.” Another approach to ensuring that culinary tourism is sustainable calls for a number of local food producers and distributers to collaborate, ideally with other public and private sectors to offer a systematically planned destination with a diversity of attractions. A cooperative of growers in Michigan provides an excellent example of such “clustering,” as it is called in the tourism industry.

As both a scholarly field of study and an initiative within the tourism industry, culinary tourism is complex and multifaceted. It also offers unique insights into not only numerous issues facing us today, but also possibilities for resolving those issues. Perhaps of utmost significance is its potential for encouraging the recognition of the power of food. It reflects our personal and cultural histories and ties us to all the external and internal forces shaping our lives. As food scholar Fabio Parasecoli points out in relation to food and tourism: “A deeper awareness of the political, non-neutral nature of semiotic processes defining codes and modalities of cultural exchange can help tourists to shift their location not only physically, but also culturally. Having a better grasp of the various signifying networks that make tourists define a phenomenon, in our case a dish or a product, as ‘typical’ or ‘local’ might help them learn how to occupy the subject position of the otherness, without losing the awareness of their own location.” 42 As such, culinary tourism offers the opportunity to explore not only other foods and cultures but also our own lives through food.

1. Respectively, Lisa M. Heldke, Exotic Appetites: Ruminations of a Food Adventurer (New York: Routledge, 2003) ; Lucy M. Long, ed., Culinary Tourism (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004) ; C. Michael Hall, et al., eds., Food Tourism Around the World: Development, Management and Markets (London: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2003) .

2. Ane-Mette Hjalager and Greg Richards, eds., Tourism and Gastronomy (London: Routledge, 2002) ; Priscilla Boniface, Tasting Tourism: Travelling for Food Drink (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003) ; C. Michael Hall and Liz Sharples, “The Consumption of Experiences or the Experience of Consumption? An Introduction to the Tourism of Taste,” in Hall, et al., Food Tourism Around the World , 1–24 .

3. Long, Culinary Tourism , 37–44; C. Michael Hall and Liz Sharples, Food and Wine Festivals and Events Around the World (London: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2008) .

4. Fabio Parasecoli, Bite Me: Food in Popular Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2008), 142 .

5. Donna R. Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998) .

6. Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food (New York: Free Press, 2002), 223 .

7. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989) .

8. Warren Belasco, Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took on the Food Industry (1989; repr., Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993) .

9. Jeffrey Steingarten, “Lost in Beijing,” Vogue (June 2008): 178–181, 203 .

10. Lucy M. Long, “Food Pilgrimages: Seeking the Authentic and Sacred in Food” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Food and Society, Boston, MA, June 2006) .

11. David J. Telfer and Atsuko Hashioto, “Food Tourism in the Niagara Region: The Development of a Nouvelle Cuisine,” in Hall, et al., Food Tourism Around the World , 158–77 ; Lucy M. Long, “Culinary Tourism and the Emergence of an Appalachian Cuisine: Exploring the Foodscape of Asheville, NC,” North Carolina Folklore Journal 57, no. 1 (2010): 4–19 ; Rosario Scarpato, “Sustainable Gastronomy as a Tourist Product,” in Hjalager and Richards, Tourism and Gastronomy , 132–53 .

12. See, for example, Bruce Geddes, Lonely Planet World Food Mexico (Hawthorn, Australia: Lonely Planet, 2000) .

13. For more information on ICTA, see Eric Wolf, Culinary Tourism: The Hidden Harvest (Dubuque, IA: Kendall Hunt Publishing, 2006) .

14. Wilbur Zelinsky, “The Roving Palate: North America’s Ethnic Restaurant Cuisines,” Geoforum 16, no. 1 (1985): 51 .

15. Rogert Abrahams, “Equal Opportunity Eating: A Structural Excursus on Things of the Mouth,” in Ethnic and Regional Foodways in the United States: The Performance of Group Identity , ed. Linda Keller Brown and Kay Mussell (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), 19–36 .

16. Jay Ann Cox, “Eating the Other: Ethnicity and the Market for Authentic Mexican Food in Tucson, Arizona” (Ph.D. diss., University of Arizona, 1993) .

17. David Bell and Gill Valentine, Consuming Geographies: We Are Where We Eat (London: Routledge, 1997), 6, 185–207 .

18. Bob Ashley, et al., Food and Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 2004), vii .

19. Brown and Mussell, Ethnic and Regional Foodways ; Lucy M. Long, “Culinary Tourism: A Folkloristic Perspective on Eating and Otherness,” Journal of Southern Folklore 55, no. 30 (1998): 181–203 .

20. David Beriss and David Sutton, eds., The Restaurants Book: Ethnographies of Where We Eat (Oxford: Berg, 2007) .

21. John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage, 1990) .

22. Daisy Tam and Nicola Frost, eds., “Food Journeys: Culinary Travels in Time and Space,” Food, Culture and Society 11, no. 2 (2008): 129 .

23. Kaori O’Connor, “The Hawaiian Luau: Food as Tradition, Transgression, Transformation and Travel,” Food, Culture and Society 11, no. 2 (2008): 149–72 ; Daisy Tam, “‘Slow Journeys,” Food, Culture and Society 11, no. 2 (2008): 207–18 .

24. C. Michael Hall, “Wine Tourism in New Zealand,” in Tourism Down Under II: Towards A More Sustainable Tourism , ed. G. Kearsley (Otago: University of Otago Centre for Tourism, 1996), 109–19 .

25. C. Michael Hall and R. Mitchell, “Wine and Food Tourism,” in Special Interest Tourism: Context and Cases , ed. N. Douglas and R. Derrett (New York: Wiley, 2001), 308 .

Hall, et al., Food Tourism Around the World , 10.

Boniface, Tasting Tourism , 23–25.

28. Erik Cohen and Nir Avieli, “Food in Tourism: Attraction and Impediment,” Annals of Tourism Research 31, no. 4 (2004): 755–78 .

29. Amy Bentley, “From Culinary Other to Mainstream American: Meanings and Uses of Southwestern Cuisine,” in Long, Culinary Tourism , 209–25 ; Abrahams, “Equal Opportunity Eating,” 19–36.

Long, Culinary Tourism , 32–34.

Heldke, Exotic Appetites , 163, 172.

32. Kevin Meethan, Tourism in a Global Society: Place, Culture, Consumption (Basinstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 114 .

33. Richard Wilk, Home Cooking in the Global Village: Caribbean Food from Buccaneers to Ecotourists (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 172 ; George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1993) .

34. Lolis Eric Elie, ed., Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbecue (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009) ; Lucy M. Long, Regional American Food Culture (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 2009), 138–39 .

35. Kathy Neustadt, Clambake: A History and Celebration of an American Tradition (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992) .

Long, “Culinary Tourism,” 4–19.

37. Susan Kalcik, “Ethnic Foodways in America: Symbol and the Performance of Identity,” in Brown and Mussell, Ethnic and Regional Foodways , 37–65 .

38. James L. Watson, ed., Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997) .

O’Connor, “The Hawaiian Luau,” 149–71.

40. Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken, 1989) .

41. Erve Chambers, Native Tours: The Anthropology of Travel and Tourism (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 2000), 122 .

Parasecoli, Bite Me , 144–45.

Boniface Priscilla. Tasting Tourism: Travelling for Food Drink . Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003 .

Google Scholar

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Hall, C. Michael, and Liz Sharples. Food and Wine Festivals and Events Around the World . London: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2008 .

Hall, C. Michael, et al. Wine Tourism Around the World: Development, Management and Markets . London: Butterworth Heinemann, 2002 .

Hall, C. Michael, et al. Food Tourism Around the World: Development, Management and Markets . London: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2003 .

Heldke, Lisa M. Exotic Appetites: Ruminations of a Food Adventurer . New York: Routledge, 2003 .

Hjalager, Ane-Mette, and Greg Richards, eds. Tourism and Gastronomy . London: Routledge, 2002 .

Long, Lucy M. “ Culinary Tourism: A Folkloristic Perspective on Eating and Otherness. ” Southern Folklore 55, no. 3 ( 1998 ): 181–204.

——. “ Culinary Tourism and the Emergence of an Appalachian Cuisine: Exploring the Foodscape of Asheville, NC. ” North Carolina Folklore Journal 57, no. 1 ( 2010 ): 4–19.

——, ed. Culinary Tourism . Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004 .

Lysaght, Patricia, ed. Food and the Traveller: Migration, Immigration, Tourism and Ethnic Food . Cyprus: Intercollegiate Press, 1998 .

Wilk, Richard. Home Cooking in the Global Village: Caribbean Food from Buccaneers to Ecotourists . Oxford: Berg, 2006 .

Wolf, Erik. Culinary Tourism: The Hidden Harvest . Dubuque, IA: Kendall Hunt Publishing, 2006 .

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Authentic-Ish: Ramen, Culinary Tourism, and Canadian Foodways pp. 67-81

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Originating from a food shortage in Japan, ramen—or Japanese noodle soup—has become a sought-after dish across Canada. Canadian ramen restaurants add their own twists, combining the traditionality of Japanese ramen with Canadian culture. Using local ingredients and tastes, they describe their food as “authentic” or “Japanese inspired” rather than “traditional.” Through an autoethnographic examination of two ramen restaurants—one in Atlantic Canada, the other in Ontario— I explore ramen’s transformation from a food of poverty to a desirable form of Canadian ethnic cuisine. Drawing on Lucy M. Long’s concept of “culinary tourism,” I consider how ramen restaurants function as tourism not only for consumers of ramen, but also for the people who cook and serve it. Ramen may be “just noodles and soup,” but as culinary tourism, it conflates and contests socio-economic status, cultural identities, and racial identities in complex ways.

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Culinary Tourism. By Lucy M. Long, ed. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004. Pp. xiv + 306, ISBN 0-8131-2292-9)

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Volume 28, Number 2, 2006 , p. 229–230 Les noces en vrai

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This volume of twelve essays edited by Lucy M. Long brings together an impressive collection of established and emerging foodways scholars. In defining and developing the concept of culinary tourism, it is an important publication.

The book opens with a short foreword by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Kimblett and an introductory article by Lucy Long that traces the development of culinary tourism. Long encourages broadening the notion and her definition pushes boundaries. According to Long, culinary tourism is not just food for the tourist, but rather “the intentional, exploratory participation in the foodways of another — participation including the consumption, preparation, and presentation of a food item, cuisine, meal system, or eating style considered to belong to a culinary system not one’s own” (21). We engage in culinary tourism at home and in the food court as well as when we travel.

Building on this definition, Long and the other contributors offer several valuable interpretive typologies for types of otherness, foodways, venues for tourism, and strategies for negotiating otherness in cultural tourism (11). For example, in the context of foodways, Long suggests analysing “otherness” along two perpendicular axes: the first runs from Edible/Palatable to Inedible/Unpalatable while the second, intersecting continuum, extends from Exotic to Familiar. These analytic guides provide useful tools.

Articles offer a broad sampling of cross-cultural explorations of culinary tourism in three kinds of contexts: public and commercial; private and domestic; and constructed and emerging. Papers focussing on public contexts examine venues where food is not only being presented but is sold to outsiders: Thai restaurants, an Hawaiian festival, tourist industry’s uses of Mexican food, and Jewish food in contemporary Poland. Essays on culinary tourism in domestic contexts centre on familiar, informal settings where food is shared among family and friends. These papers explore an equally impressive spread as those in the first section, from aspects of Jewish and Basque American foodways to the experiences of Mormon missionaries in Guatemala. Finally, articles on culinary tourism in emerging contexts consider settings that are not historically bound but are actively being invented and negotiated. Studies focus on newer examples, examining southwestern American cuisine, the dynamics of ethnic foods in American contexts (the Catskills, Kansas, and Wisconsin), and baby boomers’ attraction to Asian food. Articles in all three sections underline food’s links to politics and explore culinary tourism’s connections to constructions of authenticity, memory, and most centrally, otherness.

One leaves Culinary Tourism with a deeper understanding of some of food’s complex relationships to the politics of culture. Although this collection feels more like a necessary foundation than an exciting departure, the book will undoubtedly serve as an important springboard for future work that further develops the interpretative challenges it introduces.

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Attracting Culinary Tourists

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Welcome to Attracting Culinary Tourists, an Elevating Canadian Experiences Webinar.

The goal of the webinar is to arm you with the information and tactics needed to attract culinary tourists to your destinations. This includes developing the ability to:

  • differentiate between culinary tourism and other forms of tourism, while identifying examples of culinary experiences relevant to your region;
  • describe the breadth and diversity of businesses involved in culinary tourism through deconstructing the culinary tourism value chain; and
  • explain to tourism operators and stakeholders why culinary tourism is a vital component in servicing the needs of travellers.

This webinar also teaches you how to:

  • distinguish between the various types of culinary tourists through an explanation of how the market segment has evolved;
  • define foodways and integrate them into existing value propositions to meet the expectations of culinary tourists;
  • identify opportunities to generate increased visitor demand through attracting culinary tourists; and
  • Apply best practices and grassroots marketing tactics when attracting culinary tourists.

Welcome to Attracting Culinary Tourists, an Elevating Canadian Experiences webinar.

Before moving on in the webinar, please note the sidebar along your screen where links to external references and other resources will appear throughout the presentation.

At this time, it’s important to acknowledge the extraordinary value that Indigenous peoples across Canada bring to the tourism industry. The land and traditional territories of the First Nations, Métis, and Inuit provide unique culinary offerings that enhance the experiences for visitors to destinations all over the country.

Through the combined efforts of several organizations, including the Indigenous Tourism Association of Canada and Indigenous Culinary of Associated Nations, Indigenous culinary has grown into a popular driver for the development of tourism in Canada.

Elevating Canadian Experiences

The tourism sector is a key contributor to Canada’s economy, and there is opportunity to maximize its potential by showcasing our culinary excellence to tourists, both domestic and international, and expanding products and experiences into the shoulder and winter seasons.

Funded by the Government of Canada, the Elevating Canadian Experiences program offers tailored content to help destination marketing organizations and businesses develop strategies to boost culinary tourism as well as winter and shoulder season tourism across the country.

The ECE program is a team effort, in which deep research and shared knowledge are brought together to ensure tourism continues to thrive as an economic pillar in Canada.

Webinar Learning Outcomes

Module one: an introduction to culinary tourism, intro to culinary tourism.

Before attempting to attract culinary tourists to your destination, it’s important to understand the gap between the food & drink and tourism industries. By doing so, you’re able to identify ways to bridge that gap, which opens the door to developing compelling culinary experiences that drive tourism in Canada.

Bridging the Gap Between Food & Drink and Tourism

Although many restaurants don’t consider themselves as tourism businesses, it’s critical that those serving food and drink are open and ready to meet the needs of visitors to your destinations. Similarly, not all tourism businesses harness the value that the local culinary community adds to a destination’s product and service offerings.

The result is tourism attractions, such as museums, often sell food that has nothing to do with the place in which they operate.

This situation is not unique to Canada; in fact, destinations all around the world are continuing to serve the food that they think visitors want. However, our research shows there is consumer demand for higher quality culinary experiences that reflect the destination they’re visiting.

So, what does it mean to bring these two industries together through culinary tourism development?

In short, it means offering more meaningful and multisensory experiences that reflect your destinations. It also means stimulating visitor demand and localizing the economic impact on your tourism operators, businesses, and attractions.

And considering the current realities facing the two industries, a shift towards a culinary tourism model will also help build both resiliency and sustainability into Canadian tourism – especially in the post-pandemic era.

Now that we’ve identified the gap between the tourism industries, let’s define exactly what culinary tourism is. It’s considered “any tourism experience where a person interacts with food and drink that reflects the history, heritage, and culture of a place.”

Food tourism, and gastronomy tourism are other labels for culinary tourism, with one term being used over another depending on the destination; for example, gastronomy tourism is more often used in Europe.

The important thing to remember is that culinary tourism is focused on the meaningful connection between food and place.

There are countless activities and experiences associated with culinary tourism. A few examples are:

  • apple picking at a local farm or orchard;
  • making maple taffy while on a winter hike; or
  • having a local and seasonal goods picnic at a remote location or conservation area.

It’s important to understand the diverse experiences associated with culinary tourism, because it shows that not all tourism experiences stand alone from food and beverage. In fact, there is often overlap, which must be consider when trying to attract culinary tourists to your destinations.

To explain, think about how rural tourism is enhanced when you combine it with a culinary-related experience, such as touring a wine region in an RV – with a designated driver, of course.

Or consider how outdoor adventures are complemented by culinary tourism, like a guided fishing trip ending with a shore lunch prepared by a local chef using seasonal ingredients from the region’s food producers.

Culinary Tourism Value Chain

Food & drink products and experiences are used by a variety of tourism businesses to capitalize on the growing popularity of culinary tourism. This led to the development of the culinary tourism value chain, which was designed to increase the competitive advantage of your destinations and their operators.

Given the limited capacity of a single service provider or attraction, businesses band together through collaboration in order to deliver combined value to consumers. This allows individual operators to remain focused on what they do best while benefiting from the increased efficiency and effectiveness of working as a collective.

Visitor experiences are also enriched with each layer of value they receive when exploring a destination. This presents the opportunity for your destinations’ culinary communities to form strategic partnerships with businesses and deliver multisensory experiences that exceed the expectations of visitors.

Any business that includes a taste of place or culinary experience as part of their offerings are featured in the value chain, such as:

  • accommodations;
  • attractions;
  • beverage producers;
  • cooking schools;
  • farmers’ and public markets;
  • festivals & events;
  • growers, producers, and suppliers;
  • foodservice operators;
  • retailers; and
  • tour operators.

The Future of Culinary Tourism

Prior to COVID-19, experiential travel was on the rise. And when the tourism industry finally rebounds from the pandemic, research suggests the trend will continue to rise in popularity.

We know there is pent-up demand for travel and consumers are seeking human connection more so than ever. Culinary tourism offers hands-on, multisensory experiences with local businesses and attractions and allows visitors to connect with your destinations in a more meaningful way.

Also, as we’ve seen in the past, and especially through the pandemic, consumers are increasingly more aware of their local food system. And travellers are no different, wanting to know where their food comes from when visiting a Canadian destination.

Culinary tourists are especially eager for hands-on experiences that allow them to interact with the people and stories of the places they visit. For them, it’s a way to get to know the destination better.

The pandemic has also shown that driving trips will be prioritized over flying, specifically with culinary tourism in mind. As such, there’s an opportunity to target Canadian travellers who wouldn’t normally travel within the country but are now looking at places closer to home.

This also indicates a shift to a more safety-conscious decision-making process about where, when, why, and how consumers travel for pleasure. Knowing this, businesses must develop communication strategies to educate travellers about how they are kept safe when visiting your destinations.

Aside from that, outdoor activities and attractions with fewer crowds are bound to be favoured in a post-COVID environment. It’s important to keep this factor in mind when developing culinary tourism experiences in your region.

Module Two: What Attracts Culinary Tourists?

So, what attracts travellers to remote and rural destinations?

As you know, urban regions often seek to attract a broad range of consumers who haven’t visited or seldom visit their destination. An international traveller from the U.K. or the U.S., for example, who might only travel to Canada once or twice in their lifetime.

A rural explorer, on the other hand, is often from a large urban area and looking to escape the bustle of the city. They are interested in day trips to the smaller communities surrounding where they live and are keen to make the most of their free time with family or as a couple. And if a relative or friend is visiting for a few days, these types of consumers will often suggest the unique culinary tourism or agritourism experiences nearby as something to do.

Rural explorers are looking for unique, quality experiences to discover, try, and be pleasantly surprised by. Which presents an opportunity for rural communities across Canada, as they are ideally position to fill the needs of travellers searching for hidden gems, quaint and tranquil sceneries, and small-town hospitality.

Don’t forget, these consumers aren’t interested in the most luxurious, most iconic places; they want to make discoveries off the beaten path, while connecting with nature and creating lasting memories with friends and family. They are also passionate about supporting local businesses and attractions and often seek out farm-to-table experiences when available.

Finally, rural explorers share their adventures with other tourists more often than international travelers, and the potential for repeat visits and additional product sales are much higher – even after they return to their urban homes.

Before moving on in the module, please refer worksheet now available in the sidebar.

In the worksheet, jot down a few points about one of your favorite trips, specifically what you remember about the culinary experiences in and around the destination.

Now, ask yourself:

  • What role did food & drink play in making the trip one of your favourites?
  • Why would people travel to that destination specifically for food and drink?

Module Three: Identifying and Understanding Culinary Tourists

Foodies and food-connected consumers.

Next, let’s identify exactly who culinary tourists are.

When talking about the culinary tourist, there is a common stereotype about who that person is. Many of us picture someone at a fancy restaurant, taking Instagram photos, and writing about culinary experiences on their food blog. They are the quintessential foodie and an important part of the market. But they are only part the story.

Although a foodie is very much a culinary tourist, they are only one part of much larger market segment. In fact, culinary tourists are a very diverse group who are motivated by experiential travel and want authentic connections with the destinations they visit.

In other words, culinary tourists are “visitors who plan their trips partially or totally in order to taste the cuisine of a place.” They are both consumers looking for exclusive meals at high-end restaurants as well as those craving street food from markets stalls, while some culinary tourists are agritourists looking to connect to where their food comes from.

Before defining the other segments of culinary tourists, let’s take a closer look at foodies first.

These are the classic, niche food tourists who plan some of their trips specifically around food and drink experiences. And even when they are travelling for other reasons, such as a business trip or family vacation, they are still looking for ways to incorporate local tastes into their itinerary.

Foodies are motivated by food and drink, of course, but they are also interested in a destination’s culinary-related activities and agritourism offerings. These consumers are informed and plan many of their experiences and must-visit attractions in a destination prior to their arrival; this includes making the necessary reservations for accommodation and transportation.

It’s important to note, culinary tourism is a direct subset of cultural tourism, which means many foodies can also be considered cultural tourists. As such, when attracting this type of traveller to your destination or business, remember to clearly communicate the local culture, unique culinary experiences, and experiential tourism offered.

It’s also imperative to have a strong online presence with an informative, accessible website that allows consumers to plan their trip ahead of time.

The second group of culinary tourists are food-connected consumers.

Remember, not all food tourists think of themselves as being that specific type of traveller. So, unlike foodies who often make decisions about travel based on food and drink, food-connected tourists view culinary experiences as a pleasant and enjoyable add on; but it’s not necessarily a determining factor when selecting a destination to visit.

As such, food-connected consumers typically don’t plan all of their culinary experience in advance. This presents an opportunity to spontaneously attract these consumers to your businesses and attractions after they’re arrived to the destination.

To explain, consider a traveller who happily stops by a farmers’ market because the owner of the local B&B recommended it to them. In this case, they didn’t specifically seek out the experience, but having it suggested to them added a multisensory element to their stay, which made the trip that much more memorable.

A third type of culinary tourist is the agritourist, which is a niche segment within food tourism.

Many culinary tourists enjoy agritourism activities, like berry picking and visiting farm stands; however, agritourists take their passion for food and drink a step further, seeking out first-hand experiences such as watching demos, joining a farm tour, or even volunteering to stomp grapes at a local vineyard.

Agritourists are also interested in food production and want to learn about the people, places and practices involved in the agriculture of a destination.

For operators trying to attract this type of culinary tourist, watch the Elevating Canadian Experiences webinar, Growing Agritourism, which is now linked in the sidebar.

Other Types of Tourists and Tourism

The final type of culinary tourist is every other type of travelling consumer.

When you expand your definition of culinary tourism and the culinary tourist, it’s easier to identify the ways you can localize dollars within your region. Remember, all tourists have to eat, and in turn, that creates an opportunity to boost tourism through unique experiences with food and drink.

Even if someone’s primary reason to visit is having an outdoor or rural experience, as a business, there are ways you can enhance their trip through culinary offerings. This is true for restaurants and food providers, but there’s also potential for attractions, accommodations, and festivals as well.

Sometimes, all it takes is good storytelling to convince a visitor the extra dollar for a local product is more than worth it. The key is to connect consumers to the real people – the growers, producers, brewers, and so on – behind the scenes.

When you use the power of this type of local upsell, what you’re doing is turning a general tourist into a culinary tourist. And by doing so, you’re also encouraging them to support the local economy in your destinations.

Food and drink is only a primary motivator to visit a destination for a select group of tourists: foodies. Meaning, culinary tourism doesn’t live in isolation, and more often than not, culinary experiences are seen as a complement to other tourism activities.

This is beneficial as not every destination has the ability to provide a complete food tourism experience. But that doesn’t mean food and drink aren’t still a very important part of the offering. To this point, 88.2% of destinations consider gastronomy a strategic element in defining their image and brand – even if it’s not the main draw of the region.

To explain, consider the history buff who visits a destination to explore its heritage sites and museums. During their trip, their interactions with food and drink, enjoying homemade ice cream while touring a historical town, for example, are what help create a well-rounded and truly memorable experience.

With that in mind, at the destination level, this presents opportunity to build out culinary experiences alongside your primary tourism draws.

Module Four: Attracting Niche Markets to Your Business

When it comes to attracting these niche markets – foodies, food connected consumers, and agritourists – to your business, the strategies are different than luring an international traveler to a major destination like Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver.

Don’t expect your business, particularly small restaurants and farm attractions, to be automatically added to an itinerary because of its immediate appeal. Your products and services are more likely to be complementary to the trip and experienced outside of the traveller’s itinerary.

As such, it’s important to tailor your marketing accordingly, knowing your business is something a visitor will discover once they’ve arrived to the area – or as a special stop along their way from one place to the next. Partnering with main-draw attractions or tourism operators and creating unique packages is another opportunity to attract culinary tourists.

And when you offer authentic, multisensory experiences tied to the people and places of a destination, your business has the chance to become an unexpected highlight.

Before we move on in the module, thinking back to your responses about your favourite trip and how culinary experiences made it more memorable. In the second worksheet now available in the sidebar, expand upon thoughts by answering the following questions:

  • How does access to local food and drink affect the destination’s offering?
  • How could this destination be strengthened by local food supply chains?
  • Do you know where their food supplies coming from? If so, include those locations in your answer.

Genuine and Immersive Experiences

Generally, tourists are looking for authenticity and great experiences tied to the place they’re visiting – which highlights the importance of creating genuine and immersive culinary offerings that connect ingredients, production, and processes to the local culture and traditions.

For instance, in Bangkok, a unique experience is the floating market, where canals are lined with “street food” suppliers. It’s a decades’ long tradition in Bangkok, and part of local, everyday life, but for a traveler, it’s an incredible farm-to-fork experience unique to the destination.

Multisensory Experiences

Next, developing multisensory experiences is vital when attracting culinary tourists to your business. This means taste holds as much weight as sight, sound, smell, and touch.

In other words, food and drink is complemented by all the other types of sensory experiences. In the Bangkok example, food is only part of the draw; it’s a combination of the boat ride, the smells and sounds of the bustling market, and the interesting scenery that makes the experience truly memorable.

In a nutshell, a multisensory experience appeals to all five senses, with food and drink being the only tourism offering capable of doing so. This is why it’s important for businesses with unique culinary products to offer authentic and immersive experiences, such as tastings or on-farm samplings, where all five senses are engaged.

For operators looking for more information on creating this kind of experience, watch the Elevating Canadian Experiences webinar, Multisensory Experience Development, now linked in the sidebar.

Risks & Barriers

We’ve discussed some of the opportunities of attracting niche markets to your business, but what about some of the challenges?

Let’s take a look at what would deter a tourist from participating in an immersive culinary experience.

Safety is one of the primary concerns for travellers considering a food tourism or agritourism experience. Consider the floating market in Bangkok and the potential for water-related accidents; or visiting a Canadian farmstead and the dangers associated with being on a working farm.

Whether it’s picking fruits and vegetables, foraging for mushrooms, or floating on a river and tasting new foods, there are perceived risks to culinary tourism as well as real ones – even more so following a global crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

To reduce fear and build trust with consumers, it’s important to address these risks ahead of time and clearly communicate how your prioritizing the safety of visitors. This starts with identifying all the risks surrounding your experiences; and don’t forget, what appears safe and routine to you, might be totally new to a tourist and outside of their comfort zone.

It’s important to remember, similar to most consumers, tourists will often choose something more familiar than an activity with too much uncertainty surrounding their safety and comfort.

Attracting Niche Markets to Your Business

So, how do you infuse authenticity through local cuisine and traditions into your own business, and how can you create multisensory experiences within your destination?

First, by identifying foodways and where your ingredients come from, and then highlighting why those specific products are important and how they’re connected to your destination’s culture and traditions. This includes why these offers are unique to your business the community you operate in.

Businesses offering authentic and immersive experiences offer layers of value not only with their products or services, but also with the stories told by the owners, their staff, and even their local customers.

Module Five: Defining Foodways

Before moving on in the presentation, let’s refer back to your favourite trip again. You can record your thinking in a third worksheet that is now available for download in the sidebar. During your culinary experiences:

  • Were you ever curious about how the food and drink was prepared?
  • Did you think about the ingredients used and where they came from?
  • Or did you consider whether the cooking techniques and agricultural practices were tied to local culture and traditions?

When you start to think about the journey your food takes from farm-to-table, an interesting story unfolds.

A good example of this how there are multiple versions of a tourtière in Quebec, with each being declared as the original, featuring their own unique stories and flavours depending the region and seasonality of ingredients.

Generally speaking, tourtière, six-pates, and pâté à la viande are all types of meat pies in Quebec. However, the recipes – from the ingredients used, the availability of the meats, the spices, and so on – differ from region to region. So much so, strong competing views exists in the province on what a tourtière really is.

Ask a Saguenéen what a tourtière is, and they’ll give you a very different answer from someone in Gaspé, while another chef in the Montérégies will claim their recipe as being the most authentic. That’s a prime example of a culinary tourism experience that is directly tied to a destination because the pies reflect local cultures and traditions.

In an increasingly globalized world, why do we continue to associate maple syrup with Canada, tacos with Mexico, risotto with Italy, and wontons with China?

You’ll find these foods in the markets and restaurants of your hometown, but many of us will still travel a great distance to try these dishes in the places they originate from. You see, the history of food and drink is often regional, with the ingredients naturally tied to local history, culture, and the landscape.

Which is to say, tacos, risotto, and wontons are more than just menu items; they’re a manifestation of a destination and its regional foodways.

So what are foodways?

Consider foodways as:

  • the connection between agriculture and the people of a place;
  • the driver of regional culture and traditions; and
  • the main contributor to shaping the landscape and livelihoods of the communities across Canada.

This is why culinary tourism plays such an important role in celebrating and protecting rural heritage in your destinations.

Foodways are dynamic. They change in relation to social, economic, and environmental conditions, which is why there are unique stories related to foodways in every destination. Foodways are the who, what, where, when, why, and how of food – they are the reason food becomes part of the fabric of a community.

So, if you offer a culinary tourism experience, foodways are an important piece of the puzzle. Think about the suppliers you support with the food and drink you offer travellers:

  • Where do the ingredients come from?
  • How are they tied to your region and local traditions?

These elements are something visitors are eager to connect to. Don’t miss an opportunity to share those stories and reflect local foodways in the experiences you offer.

Tastes of Place

Another element to consider are the Tastes of Place , which directly connect locals and visitors to foodways. These are the interactions and experiences that bring life to the stories behind the food and drink of your region.

That said, there is no single taste of place for a destination. For instance, the tourtière isn’t solely associated to Quebec, nor is the dish a complete reflection of the culinary offerings in its many destinations. No, instead, think of the tastes of place as a compilation of experiences and interactions with the food and drink available in your region.

And remember, it’s not just about the ingredients and flavours of a dish, but it’s also about connecting travellers with the people, places, and foodways contributing along the way.

Intangible Assets

Tastes of place aren’t always things that you eat and drink; they can also include intangible assets, such as rural hospitality, agricultural landscapes, community feel and good company. Through storytelling you can tie all these pieces together and make the connections more obvious for visitors.

By including memorable experiences in your business and tying them to the region, you connect to the foodways and create a bond between the destination and traveller, making the experience unique and more meaningful.

Culinary tourism can move a trip from great to unforgettable, with food and drink adding an additional sensory layer to the memories – that of taste. And local food is an excellent way to deliver this type of experience.

The concept of farm-to-fork, or sea-to-table, is about connecting diverse local supplies to authentic culinary experiences. Doing so creates added value, which most tourists desire and are often willing to pay a little extra for – from paying a dollar more for a local craft beer to seeking out food and drink retailers with specialized goods and unique atmospheres unlike anything found at the average grocery store.

Personal vs. Regional Foodways

That said, local food is not the be all and end all of culinary tourism. It’s also important to consider the evolution of recipes when exploring a region’s foodways. Think of an Indian restaurant on Vancouver Island: perhaps they offer a local blueberry lassi alongside the traditional mango variety.

This is a cultural fusion reflecting the influence of local ingredients on traditional recipes. Yes, local food and drink plays a key role in defining the foodways of an area, but in this instance, local sourcing is not essential to food tourism development. Instead, the personal or regional foodways are a more important highlight.

For some travelers, food is more than sustenance; it’s a way of understanding a place. That’s why showcasing foodways through storytelling is so important when communicating tastes of place to visitors – it illustrates personal food journeys and makes the consumer’s experience more meaningful.

A simple example of this is when a menu explains a family restaurant’s connection to the dishes they offer and the foodways that brought the ingredients to the visitor’s plate.

Tips for Integrating Foodways

To help you integrate foodways into the development of culinary tourism in your destination, please refer to the following five tips. You can also download the full list of tips for reference through the link now available in the sidebar.

  • Tip 1: Offer a unique “taste of place” or expression of your region and understand how your business fits into the regional food tourism narrative. Most importantly, let people know that you do this to attract food tourists to your business.
  • Tip 2: Identify where your ingredients and products are sourced from, including promoting your suppliers
  • Tip 3: Celebrate your partnerships within the local community, including online
  • Tip 4: Share stories about the recipes you use and the food you serve, and how it is tied to the region or your family history, both in person and online
  • Tip 5: Offer tastings, trainings, and/or educational opportunities that empower your staff with the knowledge required to sell your food, because if the owner isn’t always present, staff need to know the stories too.

Module Six: Reaching the Market

So far we’ve discussed how to attract niche markets such as culinary tourists. Now, let’s touch on how your reach these types of consumers. Fill out these reflection questions in the new worksheet available in the sidebar.

Before we dive into this section, let’s think back to your trip memory again. Recall that favourite trip and reflect on these two questions, including the most common responses:

  • How did you learn about the experience before selecting it as part of your travel itinerary?
  • Was it an experience you planned for before leaving, or something that was impromptu and complementary?

Use the Right Mediums

People are getting their news from an ever-increasing list of non-traditional mediums. Such as:

  • news apps; and
  • review sites

Having a website isn’t enough today. Keep in mind, if a consumer has browsed your website and is ready to purchase a product or an experience, it’s likely that individual was attracted to the site by many other forms of media beforehand.  Your website is often the last path to purchase, so it’s important to consider how you’re driving traffic to your website.

Remember, your audience is ‘hungry’ for easy to digest, engaging, beautiful content and they are using modern tools and apps to do so. This highlights the importance of connecting to consumers using the right mediums, while providing relevant content that educates, entertains, and inspires.

It’s also important to note the current trends of popular media. In this case, visuals – such as captivating images and videos – receive more engagement in the form of shares, likes, and comments.

Social Media Content

Education and awareness are key elements to creating a lasting impression online. Social media can drive sales, yes, but rather than selling a product through your posts, seek to inform, guide, and educate your followers instead.

The internet is a noisy place, with consumers being bombarded by advertising and sales messages at every turn. To stick out from the crowd, focus on drawing travellers to your website by telling inspiring and educational stories about your destinations and the experiences you offer.

Your posts don’t have to be picture-perfect either; as long as you offer value through interesting and engaging content, visitors are more likely to be interested to learn more.

For instance, a farmer can share a short, simple video on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok explaining the growing process of apples. Or the owner of a local seafood shop can share a short blog post about their first time catching lobster and how the experience inspired them to follow fishing as a career path.

These are types of stories and content that create excitement around your destination and the businesses within it. Again, it’s about highlighting the connection between the ingredients, the place, the agricultural techniques, and the people who make up the culinary experiences you offer.

Engaging Through Online Travel Agencies (OTAs)

Destination Marketing Organizations and Provincial Marketing Organizations, TripAdvisor, Yelp, and AirBnB experiences are all examples of Online Travel Agencies and tourism social media channels.

Claiming your space on any of these platforms presents you with opportunities to connect directly with consumers and potential visitors. And don’t’ forget, clients leave reviews on these channels, so one of the best way to stay top-of-mind is to review the pages of the businesses within your destination and responding quickly to customer reviews – whether they are positive or negative.

Prepare your messages in advance if you want to save time, but try and make each response as personalized as possible – you don’t want to sound like a robot! Be responsive, spontaneous, and use humour when appropriate. Most importantly, be respectful, genuine and show compassion when answering reviews.

Engaging consumers through Online Travel Agencies is the perfect opportunity to showcase the whole culinary experience, not just the taste. The temptation is to just post pictures of our storefront, restaurant, barn space, or picturesque scenery, but it’s the food and the ambiance of a destination are what attract culinary tourists the most.

So focus on what you serve; not your space. And don’t be afraid to showcase the ingredients you use along with where they are sourced from, especially if it’s local.

Brand Positioning & Storytelling Tips

Finally, to help you establish a strong brand positioning and attract culinary tourists through the power of storytelling, please refer to the following tips, which are also available in a final download in the sidebar.

  • Tip 1: Include high-quality photos of food products and experiences in your online presence
  • Tip 2: Share food-based updates through your social media channels and encourage customers to do the same
  • Tip 3: Actively collect feedback from customers on your food products and/or experiences
  • Tip 4: Facilitate positive reviews of your food products and experiences on review sites and respond constructively to negative comments, as appropriate
  • Tip 5: Know the key components of your food and drink story and share these consistently
  • Tip 6: Share your story in diverse ways, both in person and online
  • Tip 7: Ensure visitors leave your establishment with a clear understanding of your food and drink story
  • Tip 8: Empower staff to be ambassadors for the region who can recommend other food and drink experiences for visitors to enjoy

Thank you for your participation. Be sure to check out other culinary tourism webinars offered in the Elevating Canadian Experiences content hub.

For more information, or if you have any questions, please visit culinarytourismalliance.com .

Ontario: where culinary tourism opportunities abound

Bread slices and stew in a pumpkin bowl on a festive fall platter.

Ontario expands its reputation as a culinary hotspot with the MICHELIN Guide finding its way to Toronto

Guest blog by the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sport

In September 2022, Michelin released its first Toronto Guide , bringing global attention to the exciting culinary scene in the world’s most multicultural city.

“The diversity of the selection reflects the soul of this cosmopolitan city,” enthused Gwendal Poullennec, International director of the MICHELIN Guides. “With 27 cuisine types, from Japanese to Italian, Mexican to contemporary cuisine, there’s something to please every foodie here.”

“Toronto already was a multicultural place where people meet to enjoy architecture, arts and nature, and now it has become a world-class destination for gourmets too,” says Poullennec.

In total, 74 restaurants made the inaugural MICHELIN Toronto guide, including 13 starred, 17 Bib Gourmand, which recognizes “exceptionally good food at moderate prices,” and 44 recommended, demonstrating a wide range of cuisine and food-related experiences, all drawing on locally produced ingredients unique to Ontario.

Coming when it did—as the city and province, like jurisdictions worldwide, are recovering from the effects of COVID—it was a timely boost and pointed to the growing fusion of tourism and culinary tourism.

“Culinary tourism is about more than dining out,” says Rebecca Mackenzie, CEO of the Culinary Tourism Alliance ( CTA ). “It’s about offering visitors an experience to immerse themselves in the history, heritage and culture of a particular destination through its food and drink.”

In short, culinary tourism is a “taste of place” experience. And it’s becoming increasingly popular as more and more of today’s travellers demand an authentic, more connected tourism experience.

Ontario was early to recognize the importance of culinary tourism. In 2005, correctly predicting that culinary tourism would move from niche to major market status, the province introduced a 10-year Culinary Tourism Strategy and Action Plan and moved aggressively to implement it.

Visitors apple picking at an orchard.

The result was that Ontario became one of three worldwide leaders in culinary tourism readiness, according to the World Food Travel Association. And it remains a culinary “hotspot,” based on the level of culinary tourism activity in community, education, development and promotion.

Since then, Ontario has seen investment in culinary tourism grow as operators capitalize on the province’s rich and varied agriculture, viticulture (winegrowing) and aquaculture (farming in water) resources. And Ontario is primed for new investment in areas as varied as agritourism, specialty food and craft beer experiences, innovative non-alcoholic beverages incorporating local tastes, culinary tours and cooking schools that highlight regional offerings, and new food festivals and fine dining.

Woman sitting at a picnic bench with a glass of red wine, gazing at a field of sunflowers.

“We’re keen to attract entrepreneurs who understand and value the opportunities, are interested in celebrating what’s here and are eager to tap into the innovation and creativity in the province,” says Mackenzie. “And, of course, they have to be able to deliver a quality experience consistently.”

To help ensure investors succeed, the Culinary Tourism Alliance—tasked with advancing food tourism— works closely with the 13 regions across the province to help build and sustain their distinct identities and identify and develop new culinary tourism products and experiences unique to each of them.

The CTA also works with post-secondary institutions to develop culinary programs with a specific focus on culinary tourism.

Culinary students observing their instructor handling a flaming dish.

Add to that a business-friendly government that understands the value of the culinary tourism industry—and has put in place funding and education programs to support it—and it’s no wonder investment is on the rise.

If you’re an entrepreneur in the culinary tourism sector and looking for a new opportunity, why not make Ontario your next destination .

Opportunity thrives here

Learn more about Ontario.

Sign up to receive more detailed information.

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2024 Hanna Geldrich-Leffman Colloquium to focus on global foodways

Table with dishes of food on it framing the title "Global Foodways: The Intersections of Food, Politics, and Cultural Identity"

This year’s Hanna Geldrich-Leffman Colloquium will feature the theme “Global Foodways: The Intersections of Food Politics and Cultural Identity,” on Wednesday, April 10, 2024, in the 4th Floor Program Room in the Andrew White Student Center on Loyola’s Evergreen campus. The event is free and open to the public.

The colloquium's schedule is as follows:

  • 1 p.m.: Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, Ph.D., professor of Spanish, Latin American studies, and film and media studies at Washington University in St. Louis, will speak on “Cultural Density beyond Authenticity: Reflections on the Idea of the Taco”
  • 2 p.m.: Jennifer Lin Lemesurier, Ph.D., assistant professor of writing and rhetoric at Colgate University, will speak on “Gut Feelings: The Racial Rhetoric of Asian Food in America”
  • 4 p.m.: Priya Wadhera, Ph.D., professor of French at Adelphi University, will speak on “Hunger: A User's Manual for Post-War France”

Find more information on the Hanna Geldrich-Leffman Colloquium page .

About the Annual Colloquium

The Colloquium on Language, Literature, and Society was created in 1986 as a way of demonstrating in an on-going and dynamic basis the vitality and diversity of the cultures represented by the department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Loyola. In 2007, the colloquium was renamed to honor Hanna Geldrich-Leffman, long-time chair of the department and, along with Ursula Beitter, one of the co-founders of the colloquium. Conceived as an interdisciplinary event, the colloquium explores ways in which different cultures express certain ideas in various genres and media, such as the novel or film. The aim is to foster discussion and debate on the topics selected by bringing a variety of varying perspectives to bear on each issue.

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If you are a member of the media and have questions about this story, please contact Rita Buettner at [email protected] .

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UTSA and TTU Press seek writers for new indigenous foodways book series

UTSA and TTU Press seek writers for new indigenous foodways book series

Adán Medrano, a nationally recognized chef and food writer, will serve as the editor of titled “Indigenous Foodways of Texas and Northern Mexico,” a book series being developed by UTSA and Texas Tech.

MARCH 11, 2024 — The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) Libraries Special Collections and Texas Tech University Press (TTUP) will partner to develop a new book series, drawing on UTSA’s extensive Mexican Cookbook Collection and TTUP’s publishing expertise. The new series, titled “Indigenous Foodways of Texas and Northern Mexico,” will explore, preserve and propagate Indigenous food traditions, techniques and histories.

The partners are seeking projects that focalize the food confluences among people in Texas and the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León and Tamaulipas.

“UTSA’s Mexican Cookbook Collection is the largest of its kind in the nation. It’s a rich resource for researchers, chefs, students and food writers,” said Amy Rushing , assistant vice provost for UTSA Special Collections. “We are thrilled the Special Collections will be an integral part of the publication series. The project supports UTSA’s mission as a Hispanic Serving Institution by honoring and preserving Hispanic heritage.”

The book series editor is Adán Medrano , a nationally recognized chef and food writer whose work focuses on the native foods of Texas and Northeastern Mexico, the borderlands region to be explored in the new book series.

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“It’s a rich resource for researchers, chefs, students and food writers.”

The books in the series will be designed for a general audience, and will emphasize:

  • Historical cookbooks in the UTSA Mexican Cookbook Collection that could be republished for a new audience
  • Collecting and anthologizing historical materials such as a compilation of pieces about the foods of South Texas and Northeastern Mexico throughout history.
  • Popular history with Indigenous food prominently featured.

The series will support scholarly books as well, particularly those that integrate with food studies programs. Cultural histories of food and even some anthropological, archaeological and Mexican American studies scholarship could be relevant to such a series. The UTSA Libraries and TTUP will emphasize the work of scholars who are interested in incorporating their work into conversations with nontraditional (outside the academy) sources of knowledge and tradition.

Writers are encouraged to utilize and feature items from the UTSA Mexican Cookbook Collection in their work. The collection includes:

  • More than 2,500 Mexican cookbooks published in Spanish and in English, ranging in date from 1789 to the present
  • Over 100 manuscript cookbooks from the late eighteenth to the nineteenth and early mid-twentieth centuries
  • Significant holdings in regional cooking, including the largest collection of works by Josefina Velázquez de León
  • Books about herbs, medicinal plants and ingredients native to Mexico

The series’ publishers will prioritize promoting books that emphasize native ingredients and approaches, focusing on the connections between food and various topics such as climate change, history, colonialism, gender identity, economic circumstances, health and other contexts that shape society’s understanding of food and self.

— Amy Rushing and Travis Snider

UTSA Today is produced by University Communications and Marketing , the official news source of The University of Texas at San Antonio. Send your feedback to [email protected] . Keep up-to-date on UTSA news by visiting UTSA Today . Connect with UTSA online at Facebook , Twitter , Youtube and Instagram .

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‘Hey, I grew that’: the Native American school that’s decolonizing foodways

In the Umoⁿhoⁿ Nation, teens learn about nutrition and build tribal sovereignty by farming for their school and community

B efore joining her school’s gardening program this year, 14-year-old Emilie Lyons had never encountered an eggplant. She is a freshman at Umoⁿhoⁿ Nation public school, which serves more than 600 students on the Omaha reservation in Macy, Nebraska . When she brought the vegetable home, she and her dad looked up recipes for how to prepare the peculiar purple nightshade and were surprised by how tasty it was.

Umoⁿhoⁿ Nation is just one Indigenous-focused school across the US where administrators and educators are endeavoring to introduce healthy, culturally relevant foods into their lunches and other culinary initiatives.

Though each program is unique, they have similar objectives: to help kids reconnect with their heritage; to strengthen tribal sovereignty; and to combat the marked health disparities and disproportionate food insecurity – estimated at nearly 24% – affecting tribal communities in the aftermath of colonialism. About 68% of Native American children qualify for free lunches, meaning these may be the most reliable and nutritionally balanced meals they eat.

Macy is considered a food desert, with no grocery store and just a gas station serving the north-eastern Nebraska town of approximately 1,000 residents. The village also has some of the highest poverty and unemployment rates in the state. To address these overlapping issues, the Umoⁿhoⁿ Nation’s farm-to-school initiative began as a state-funded Jobs for America’s Graduates (Jag) program, designed to equip youth with employable skills and improve their success in education and their future careers. It was the students’ idea to develop a community garden where they’d log their work hours.

Three years in, the summertime program employs about 50 teens, who grow and harvest more than 25,000 plants each season, including cucumbers, peppers, tomatoes, onions, sunflowers, pumpkins, beans, corn, squash and, yes, eggplant. They prepare and preserve that produce in the school’s culinary department to be served in the cafeteria’s fresh salad bar, sold at the local farmers’ market or dished up at a new cafe in town (Macy’s first). There’s also an outdoor classroom on campus, where naturalists, elders and other knowledge keepers impart traditional Indigenous knowledge .

“This was my first experience gardening,” said Lyons. “At first, I did it for the money, but I actually really enjoyed doing the activities with my friends. It was a very powerful experience to plant a seed, care for it, watch it grow, then put these food products up at the farmers’ market. When my friends and I walk by the salad bar in the cafeteria, I’ll point something out to them and say: ‘Hey, I grew that in the garden.’”

Two images of people outdoors. In the first an adult woman walks with young boys in T-shirts past a hoop house and rows of green plants. In the second, a teenage girl with long hair squats among green plants.

In addition to developing concrete skills and earning $10 an hour working four-hour shifts, program participants are learning important life lessons. “We have noticed a difference even in how the kids carry themselves. They’re so proud of what they’ve done,” said the Umoⁿhoⁿ Nation superintendent, Stacie Hardy. “They feel connected to the school and the community, and they’re giving back to their elders. They are also developing these strong leadership and communication skills. I never could have envisioned the impact this would have on our district.”

The project’s success is largely thanks to the farm-to-school director, Suzi French, who oversees the 14,000-square-foot garden alongside Jag career specialist Ricardo Ariza. To secure the land, he worked out an agreement with the Omaha tribal council to lease 7 acres near the school for $1 per acre each year. Throughout the summer, French teaches the children not only how to care for the crops but also how to identify and forage for wild plants including chokecherries, gooseberries, mulberries and wild grapes.

“We are building farmers,” said French. “For most of these kids, this is their first job. They come to work on time. They turn off their phones. They smile and laugh. They get to just be kids for a few hours. It’s a real eye-opener for them when they get to eat what they grew and share it with the community.” That includes lunches for program participants and elders during the summer and early fall, as well as a community meal for 500 people at the annual harvest powwow.

All that activity is improving the kids’ health, too. With measurements taken at the start and end of the work season, participants saw an improvement in weight, the body mass index (BMI) height-weight scale, blood pressure and A1C levels, which measure blood sugar over time. Plus absenteeism, an issue at tribal schools, is down at Umoⁿhoⁿ Nation.

Though the farm-to-school project operated at a deficit this year, administrators have been successful in securing ongoing financing through not only the Nebraska department of labor but also the state’s vocational rehabilitation program and several foundations. The Nebraska fresh fruit and vegetable program also allows the school to purchase produce from the garden at the standard local vendor rate, meaning that money stays within the district.

Pallets of red onions, white onions, a lime-green vegetable and maybe eggplant are on a foldout table, with people standing behind and in front looking at the product.

These accomplishments have come with their fair share of obstacles. The well they dug the second year went dry in the third, requiring the teens to haul buckets in the summer heat to water the crops. There are also on-the-job problems such as dehydration from working in the heat, bee stings and the like. But the major hurdle is getting kids the right documentation to start in the Jag program.

“One of the biggest challenges is that a lot of our kids don’t have a birth certificate on file, a social security card or a bank account – all of which they need to be a department of labor employee,” said Hardy. “Many of them are raised by grandmas or great-grandmas or they couch-surf from place to place, so those documents can be hard to keep track of. As a school district, we help the students get all that set up. Then on payday, we load up the school bus and take them to the bank to cash their paychecks.”

Umoⁿhoⁿ Nation serves as a strong model for other tribal schools eager to decolonize their culinary offerings, with administrators and food service directors regularly visiting to learn about best practices. But many institutions are far from establishing such a robust program.

“Most schools are trying to get just one traditional ingredient added into their lunch program,” explained Richard Elm-Hill , a member of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin. As the senior program officer for the First Nations Development Institute ’s Nourishing Native Foods & Health program, Elm-Hill oversees the non-profit’s Native Farm to School project . He explains that institutions often face uphill battles, which vary greatly depending on school type, state and tribal regulations, and more.

“For example, if you want to incorporate traditional corn into the lunch program, you need to source it from a producer who grows it and processes it a certain way, usually at a [US Department of Agriculture]- or state-certified facility, plus that producer needs to be able to supply a large-enough quantity,” he said, noting that this often creates hurdles for small Native producers. “But there are other opportunities beyond the meal program where you don’t have to jump through all those hoops to give kids access to traditional foods, like after-school programs and sporting events.”

“Price point and sourcing tend to be some of the biggest obstacles,” added Mariah Gladstone , an Indigenous food sovereignty expert and a descendant of the Blackfeet Tribe of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation of Montana and an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Gladstone developed the online platform Indigikitchen to foster an appreciation for traditional foods. The federal governing body outlines how specific ingredients count toward meal-pattern requirements in child nutrition programs, a process called crediting.

“There can also be a question of how to credit foods to ensure all the essential meal components are covered. For instance, how do you credit stinging nettle greens – a leafy green you can use just like spinach – since they are not outlined in the USDA crediting guidelines ?”

To help address this, Gladstone developed a school toolkit in collaboration with No Kid Hungry Montana . It outlines how to identify, procure and incorporate traditional ingredients such as bison, fish, berries and root vegetables into school offerings. Though it is largely focused on Great Plains foods, the guide can help food service directors across the country navigate USDA crediting. Gladstone has helped implement the toolkit within the region, like at South Dakota’s Cheyenne River schools , where they recently added bison into their meals.

The Oglala Lakota Sioux chef Sean Sherman – a leader in the movement to revitalize Indigenous foodways with his renowned Minneapolis restaurant, Owamni , and his non-profit Natifs – is developing a similar resource for Red Cloud Indian School in South Dakota. A former boarding school , the private Catholic institution serves nearly 500 students on the Pine Ridge reservation , where Sherman grew up subsisting mainly on a diet of government commodity foods (though he did not attend Red Cloud). The area is known for having some of the highest poverty rates in the US and lowest life expectancies in the world.

Two images. One is of a middle-aged Native man with long black hair in a beautiful kitchen with wooden elements, and the other is a plate of meat cut and arranged on a plate.

In addition to advising on properly equipping the Red Cloud kitchen, Sherman and his team created kid-friendly recipes that eschew Eurocentric ingredients – reflecting his decolonized cuisine philosophy – yet remain relatively affordable and simple to prepare. Meals include turkey tamale pie with maple squash purée; bison meatloaf with cranberry wojapi sauce and wild rice, mashed sweet potatoes and corn and peppers; and turkey-and-bean chili with gluten-free, dairy-free cornbread. “We can’t just hand over Owamni recipes, which are a bit more experimental,” Sherman said with a laugh. “We don’t want to scare the kids.”

He hopes his impact reaches far beyond Red Cloud, which is why he’s establishing a wholesale side of his business to help connect tribal schools and similar organizations directly with Native producers.

“The need is too great, so we can’t just work with one school at a time,” Sherman said. “Because we can order in bulk, we can keep prices low and act as a centralized distribution point for getting food products like corn, beans and rice out there. As we develop more Indigenous Food Labs in the future, those can also serve as regional distribution points.”

Across the country, several schools have made impressive strides in incorporating Native ingredients into their culinary offerings. In Washington state, Seattle World School serves students salmon caught by the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe . Utah’s state school system sources meat from tribal-owned Ute Bison . In Hawaii, where nearly 90% of food is imported, the Māla‘ai Kula Kaua‘i Farm-to-School project connects children with traditional ingredients like kalo (taro), uala (sweet potato) and ulu (breadfruit) via school gardens and meals. These initiatives are supported by organizations such as the First Nations Development Institute, the Intertribal Agriculture Council, the National Farm to School Network , and the USDA’s farm-to-school program .

The benefits of these efforts cannot be overstated, extending far beyond personal health to encompass Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. “Our cultural foodways, kinship ways and educational frameworks were removed by design – but we can put them back by design,” said Elm-Hill. “When I look at our younger generations, I see a lot of shattered pieces that we’re trying to put back together. It would be different if from a young age, students were eating traditional meals, but they might be trying their own foods for the first time at age 16. Their taste buds have changed, but they can redevelop a taste for their traditional foods.”

This purposeful movement also prompts a larger discussion about a necessary paradigm shift within US school lunch programs as a whole. “The chicken nuggets-based school lunch model is not benefiting kids or producers, and we need to shift away from that across the board,” said Gladstone. “This cookie-cutter template of thaw-and-heat meals just has not worked. There’s a lot of work to be done to bring real food back into school lunches, but I’m really hopeful for what the future holds.”

At Umoⁿhoⁿ Nation in Nebraska, school leaders intend to keep growing their farm-to-school initiative. They have plans to dig a deeper well and incorporate a drip-line irrigation system. They will add greenhouses to extend the growing season, develop a better-equipped processing center, open a larger onsite community market and perhaps even start a small-scale livestock program. From there, Hardy dreams that one day they’ll be able to supply fresh produce to the local senior center, the hospital or even nearby school districts.

An aerial view of rows of green plants partly covered in clear plastic.

Financing those ambitions requires extensive effort on the part of Hardy’s team. For instance, this year’s farm-to-school costs – encompassing equipment, salaries and fringe benefits – totaled nearly $320,000, while funding from government and donor sources came in around $120,000, resulting in a budget shortfall. (To date, the school district has covered the deficit with its general operating funds.) Hardy isn’t discouraged.

“These new developments won’t happen as quickly as we want them to, but we’ll find donors or grant funding to make it happen,” she said. “The more people hear about our project, the more they want to offer support. We have a great group of people working on this, and we’re dedicated to figuring it out.”

Driving that steadfast determination is the program’s obvious impact on students, elders, community members and even bigger-picture tribal sovereignty. “I have been working in community food for a very long time, and one of my goals was to bring Indian corn back into our community,” said French, reflecting on the initiative’s accomplishments. “That was our most important food source 100 years ago, but over time it became so expensive that it is only used for ceremonial purposes today. This year, we planted and hand-harvested three acres of traditional corn and processed more than 400 quarts of it, so our students and community have access to it once again.”

For 14-year-old Emilie Lyons, the farm-to-school program has sparked an interest in home cooking, taught her invaluable life lessons and helped rekindle a deeper connection to her heritage. “It’s an essential life skill to know how to cook at home with your own ingredients,” she said. “It’s really fun to get to know yourself, what you like and don’t like, by preparing dishes you didn’t even know about. That’s so important because there are so many processed foods around us that aren’t good for my people. It really gives me comfort to know that we’re trying to give our people better food.”

Bison meatloaf with cranberry wojapi sauce and wild rice

Prep 40 min Cook 60-75 min Serves 6 1lb ground bison 1 cup cornmeal , fine or medium grind 2 eggs 1 14.5-oz can diced tomatoes , drained 1 onion , peeled and diced 1 bell pepper , stemmed, seeded and diced 1 carrot , diced ¾ cup cranberries , minced (fresh or frozen) 2 tbsp garlic, minced 1 tbsp pure maple syrup 1 tsp salt (or more to taste)

For the wild rice 1 cup wild rice 3½ cups water

For the cranberry sauce 1 cup cranberries (fresh or frozen) ½ cup water (plus more if sauce is too thick) ¼ tsp salt

Bring water to a boil. Stir in wild rice, reduce heat to simmer, cover, and stir occasionally for 30 to 35 minutes, or until kernels begin to puff open. Uncover, fluff with fork, and cook an additional 5 minutes. Drain excess water if necessary.

While rice is cooking, combine all cranberry sauce ingredients in a large pot and bring to a boil. Simmer for 20 minutes, adding water as necessary. Using an immersion blender, regular blender or food processor, blend until smooth. Adjust water as necessary for desired consistency.

Preheat oven to 375F (190C). Lightly coat a large loaf pan with vegetable oil.

In a very large mixing bowl, combine meatloaf ingredients. Mix until just combined, being careful not to overmix. Transfer mixture to oiled loaf pan. Spread cranberry sauce over top of meatloaf.

Place meatloaf pan on a sheet pan covered in parchment paper to catch any juices that bubble over. Bake in preheated oven for 60 to 75 minutes, until internal temperature reaches 160F (70C). Baking times may vary; always check internal temperature to ensure doneness.

Once done, remove from oven and let rest for 15 to 20 minutes to allow juices to redistribute. Slice and serve with wild rice.

Recipe courtesy of NĀTIFS.

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Dine local and save, subscribe to our newsletter, 2024 ‘southern arizona food heroes’ nominations are now open, march 14, 2024.

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By Sam Jump

Submit your nominations by Sunday, March 31.

The nonprofit Tucson City of Gastronomy (TCOG) just announced a call for nominations for the second annual Southern Arizona Food Heroes .

This year’s awards have two categories: “Food Visionary” and “Jim Griffith Foodways Keeper.”

“For the second year, we are partnering with Si Charro , the Southwest Folklife Alliance , and the University of Arizona Southwest Center to recognize people who are teaching the next generation the traditional food knowledge and cooking skills that embody the heritage of this region, and others showing us ways to a beer food future,” said Jonathan Mabry , TCOG’s Executive Director.

These awards, which carry a cash prize of $1,500 for the first-place winners, honor the dedicated people shaping and preserving Southern Arizona’s food cultures.

“We are asking for nominations of people whose valuable contributions looking to the past and the future of our food should be more widely known and appreciated,” said Mabry.  

TCOG will showcase first and second-place winners via its website , social media , and events.

The award ceremony will be held at Kennedy Park on Saturday, April 13 during the Pueblos del Maíz festival .  

Food Visionary Awards

culinary tourism foodways

The Food Visionary Awards are a partnership between TCOG and Si Charro to recognize Southern Arizona people helping us reimagine our relationships with food and creating paths to a positive food future.

The 2024 awards will focus on Southern Arizona farmers and gardeners using sustainable growing methods, applying traditional knowledge, sustaining heritage crops, involving young people, and sharing expertise with the community. Nominees must meet more than one of these criteria.

The first-place winner will receive a cash award of $1,500 from Carlotta Flores of Si Charro

The Jim Griffith Foodways Awards

culinary tourism foodways

TCOG partners with the Southwest Folklife Alliance for the “Jim Griffith Foodways Keeper” award which is a tribute to anthropologist and folklorist Jim Griffith (1935-2021). For years, Griffith supported home cooks who have sustained the food heritage and culinary traditions of the Arizona-Sonora borderlands.

The award recognizes Southern Arizona non-professional home cooks and food artisans who are helping to keep our food traditions alive by using heritage ingredients and cooking techniques unique to this region. Additionally, they share their traditional food knowledge with the community.

The first-place winner will receive a cash award of $1,500 from the University of Arizona Southwest Center.  

Nominations will be reviewed by a committee and announced in early April. For any questions, contact TCOG at  [email protected]. For more information, visit tucson.cityofgastronomy.org .

Tucson Foodie is a locally owned and operated community. Thanks to our partners and members , we are able to offer paywall-free guides and articles. We value your support and invite you to become a Tucson Foodie Insider today.

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Not many hotel companies have their own crusie line with luxury overnight explorations right from ... [+] the hotel dock, but that's just one unique experience Anantara Hotels offers in Bangkok.

The global post-lockdown travel boom has continued year after year with no slowdown in sight, but even by these standards Thailand’s capital is ultra-popular. Bangkok has never been hotter, and last year made travel industry headlines when a Mastercard report named it the most visited city in the world for 2023. This is a distinction a few places claim, and the numbers often conflict, but there’s no doubt that Bangkok is near the top of all cities on earth in popularity, is getting more U.S. travelers than ever, and is both a destination in its own right, the gateway to the rest of Thailand, and a major gateway to the entire Pacific Rim. When I visited the Anantara Siam Bangkok Hotel before the pandemic, I loved it. But when I returned at the end of 2023, it was even better.

A modern city full of amazing food and very old culture, Bangkok has skyrocketed in terms of tourism ... [+] popularity.

I remember thinking that the Siam immediately reminded me of the Peninsula Hong Kong, one of the world’s most iconic and distinctive hotels, with the same kind of grandeur, large, important lobby with afternoon tea scene, and the feeling of just having arrived someplace special. Just like Hong Kong, Bangkok has plenty of luxury hotels, yet no others that so complete capture this particular gravitas and sense of place.

It turned out not to be such a coincidence, as the grand city hotel was originally built as part of the luxury Peninsula brand. It continued its high-end run as a Regent, then a Four Seasons, before finally becoming the global flagship for Anantara. But unlike many luxury hotels which simply operate under management contracts, Anantara founder William Heinecke, who moved to Thailand from the States when he was just 14, actually owns the hotel through his Minor Hotel Group , and calls the shots (Minor also owns sevral other major brands including Avani, safari specialist Elewana, NH Hotels, Tivoli and the St. Regis Bangkok down the block from the Siam for good measure).

Bangkok is also the gateway to the rest of Thailand's charms.

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The fast-growing Thailand-based luxury brand has spread across the Pacific Rim, Middle East and increasingly, throughout Europe. With a mix of architecturally significant new builds (such as the Marker in Dublin ) and restorations of historically important grand buildings (stunning Palazzo Naiadi in Rome ), Anantara has earned its place alongside the other famous brands mentioned above, but still remains a little off the radar to American travelers. That’s a loss for visitors to Bangkok. All of the Anantara properties I’ve visited, from Bali to Italy, have been enjoyable, but Bangkok stands out for a few reasons.

One big thing that sets Anantara apart here in its home city is that the company has two very different, distinctive, yet complementary Bangkok options, the Siam and sister Anantara Riverside . The former is a grand, iconic city hotel, the latter a low rise, waterfront, resort-style urban oasis in the city’s suddenly very popular riverfront area. This allows those visiting Bangkok to have two very different experiences in the same city of 11 million plus. The two things they have in common is that each resort has a very broad array of high-quality dining options, including Thai cuisine, and as Anantara has a brand-wide focus on its excellent spas, both of these have standouts.

Set on 11 waterfront acres, the Anantara Riverside is a true urban oasis, a resort in one of the ... [+] world's busiest cities.

I’ve also stayed at the Riverside, and it’s a great option for combining urban and resort flair. It just completed an $11 million renovation three months ago (December 2023), so all 408 rooms, including more than100 suites, are like new. The resort occupies a generous 11-acres, landscaped with lush gardens, within Bangkok, and has multiple outdoor dining options. It sits directly across the river from Asiatique , a major tourist attraction, a waterfront promenade complex full of boutiques, food stalls, bars, restaurants and entertainment—even a giant Ferris wheel.

How about an evening Manohra dinner cruise on the river, right from the hotel dock?

But the most unique benefit of the setting is that the resort offers a variety of excursions by boat, perfect for Bangkok but unusual at any city hotel. First, Riverside has city day tours with its “Klong Guru,” (klong means canal) using a private boat to visit important temples, artists studio and even do city food tours. Riverside also offers Manohra Cruises , luxury Thai dinner trips nightly on its large river barge. Most uniquely, Anantara’s corporate parent, Minor Hotels, operates one- and two-night luxury cruises on two boutique Loy Pela Voyages ships, all of which operate from the Riverside hotel’s dock. The ships have luxury private staterooms and an emphasis on the included food and wine, as well as off-ship guided cultural excursions. A short, overnight, very intimate, white glove cruise from the heart of one of the busiest cities on earth is a really interesting vacation activity you will be hard pressed to replicate in many other places.

Anantara is famous for its spas, and this is a couples suite at the Riverside spa.

Because of its attention to culinary arts, Anantara was also the first luxury international brand to roll out a brand-wide cooking school program, Spice Spoons, with locations teaching the local cuisine at many of its resorts. Hands-on Spice Spoons cooking classes are available at Riverside, and not including the dinner cruises, Anantara Riverside has no less than a dozen food and beverage outlets, including one of the few remaining outposts of iconic tiki bar brand Trader Vic’s. Another interesting class offered you won’t find at many competitors is Muay Thai, or Thai Kickboxing. I did it, and it’s an amazing workout—don’t schedule right before cooking school because you might not be able to lift your hands afterwards. There are also scheduled Tai Chi and yoga classes.

Private outdoor dining venue at the Anantara Riverside

In addition to the large, very well-equipped spa and fitness center, Riverside houses the BDMS Wellness Clinic Retreat , part of Bangkok Dusit Medical Services. Travel for medical wellness has been a fast-growing trend, especially abroad, and this facility offers services such as bespoke medical wellness check-up packages, personalized health assessments, rejuvenating aesthetic facial and body treatments, preventative medical therapies, and personalized supplement regimens.

Back in the city center, the palatial Anantara Siam is well located in the heart of the Ratchaprasong shopping and entertainment district, within easy walking distance of the city’s top luxury mall—shopping is a major attraction in Bangkok. It’s also very close to an important historic temple, and immediately adjacent to the Ratchadamri station on the BTS sky train, the best way to explore Bangkok while beating the city’s infamous rush hour gridlock. Just on the other side of the station is Lumphini Park, the “Central Park of Bangkok.”

Entrance to the iconic Anantara Siam Bangkok hotel

The Anantara Siam Bangkok experience begins when you roll up to the circular driveway and enter the grand lobby, but it continues through your entire stay. I’m a huge fan of hotels with club lounges, fairly standard among luxury properties in Asia but still uncommon here in the U.S. The Siam has a great one, the Kasara Executive Lounge , included in all suites and Garden Terrace room stays, complete with in lounge check-in/out. It has private meeting rooms for business travelers, VIP concierge, complimentary afternoon tea mid- afternoon, hors d’oeuvres and adult beverages each evening, and an elaborate breakfast, with made to order and buffet, featuring Western and Thai specialties. The Garden Terrace rooms are quite unique for a downtown property, on the second floor with resort-style terraces that open onto gardens surrounding the swimming pool. All the guest rooms in any category are spacious, especially for a city hotel, and all have luxury bathrooms with separate oversized tubs and walk-in rain showers.

The grand lobby of the Anantara Siam Bangkok, home to the city's most famous Afternoon Tea.

Dining is definitely a highlight, and the Siam has three fine dining restaurants, Italian, Japanese and Spice Market, the popular Thai spot. There’s also a hip cocktail-focused more causal eatery, Guilty, a coffee shop, the poolside Terrace, a deluxe Sunday jazz brunch that is a Bangkok institution, and the Lobby lounge, with all day dining and its famous afternoon tea. But one of the biggest surprises is a Pacific Rim outpost of London’s famous Café Wolseley. Minor Hotels acquired the hospitality group that runs the original and several other eateries in London and Paris, and opened this last year as a pop-up, though it shows no signs of ending its run. I normally go very local when I travel, and in Thailand am focused on Thai cuisine, but I did have lunch here and was shocked how good it was. If you like the original, or are craving a taste of London’s finer things on the road, it’s highly recommended.

If you can’t make up your mind where to eat—there are so many options—simply head to the Aqua Bar, one of Bangkok’s greatest watering holes. It is located off the lobby in an indoor/outdoor area known to locals regulars as “the Secret Garden,” which is enclosed on all four sides but open to the sky above. Aqua sits in this landscaped courtyard, alongside a Koi pond, and coming here is like leaving the outside world behind, especially in the beating heart of one of the world’s most busting metropolises. There is live music every night, typically New Orleans jazz or rhythm and blues. The cocktails are excellent, the wine list deep, but what makes it so special is the menu—in addition to the bar’s own extensive choices of snacks, charcuterie boards, salads and caviar, they have signature items from several of the hotel’s marquee eateries, including its excellent Italian spot Biscotti, Japanese fine dining eatery Shintaro, and one of the most acclaimed Thai spots in the city, Spice Market. There’s even an entire page of mussels and frites options—who says you can’t have it all?

Luxury stateroom on the overnight Loy Pela Voyages cruises offered by Anantara Hotels in Bangkok

The Siam also has an outpost of Spice Spoons, offering three-hour immersion Thai cooking classes, a world -class spa, and extensive fitness center. Its open-air pool complex is an urban escape, and other unusual amenities include an outpost of London-based Truefitt & Hill, a Guinness World Records holder as the planet’s oldest barbershop (1805), a more modern beauty salon, an IV Drip Bar, and a shopping arcade with multiple outlets, from bespoke tailoring to a Metropolitan Museum of Art gift shop.

As mentioned above, medical wellness travel is more popular than ever, and while the Siam does not house its own facility, many guests stay here and use the Clinique La Prairie Longevity Hub at the St. Regis next door, under the same ownership. Ther brand famously began with an anti-aging clinic in Montreux, Switzerland, and now is one of the premier medical destinations on earth. There are only five other locations around the world, and this is the only one in Thailand.

Anantara was the first global luxury hotel chain to launch brand-wide cooking classes, Spice Spoons, ... [+] and both Bangkok properties offer 3-hour hands-on culinary experiences

The Siam is such a great base for exploring the city that you may be tempted to skip exploring altogether and stay here, especially if combined with a stay at Riverside and a cruise.

Larry Olmsted

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Restaurant Globus

Ratings and reviews, location and contact, restaurant globus, elektrostal - restaurant reviews & photos - tripadvisor.

IMAGES

  1. Food

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  2. Culinary Tourism: Turn Amazing Food Into an Unforgettable Experience

    culinary tourism foodways

  3. Top 15 Travel Destinations for Culinary Tours in 2020

    culinary tourism foodways

  4. Culinary Tourism: Which are the 6 Best Gastronomic Destinations?

    culinary tourism foodways

  5. Looking at the Foundations of Food Tourism Through ‘Foodways’

    culinary tourism foodways

  6. How Culinary Tourism Is Becoming a Growing Trend in Travel

    culinary tourism foodways

COMMENTS

  1. Culinary Tourism

    CULINARY TOURISM: "Eating Out Of Curiosity" —"the intentional, exploratory participation in the foodways of an Other" (Long, 2004) "Exploring the world through food." Also known as gastrotourism and food tourism. The phrase "culinary tourism" was coined by folklorist Dr. Lucy Long to explore the meanings, motivations, and implications of seeking food experiences different from ...

  2. Formulating Sustainable Foodways for the Future: Tradition and

    Culinary tourism presents opportunities for travelers to taste another culture, and may provide economic and pride-in-heritage-based motivation to retain or revitalize local sustainable foodways - though, of course, travel presents its own set of sustainability issues (Wondirad et al. 2021).

  3. Culinary Tourism

    Culinary tourism also commodifies food and foodways. While food is oftentimes the center of monetary exchange, tourist activities emphasize the value of a food to attract tourist dollars. This then trivializes and "trinketizes" cultural practices and forms, turning them into "playthings" and souvenirs for tourists.

  4. Looking at the Foundations of Food Tourism Through 'Foodways'

    The term "foodways" describes how food, culture, and history connect. Foodways help us better understand how ingredients and dishes relate to the heritage and traditions of a specific area or people. Put simply, foodways are the who, what, where, when, why, and how of food and drink. Understanding foodways allows us to tell meaningful ...

  5. Feeding a tourism boom: changing food practices and systems of

    Practices, foodways and systems of provision. Our theoretical and ontological point of departure is that the basic unit of society is made of practices and that a practice perspective provides unique insights into human action, including food provisioning and consumption (see Neuman, Citation 2019; Warde, Citation 2016).Much has been written about the practice turn in the social sciences (see ...

  6. Culinary Tourism

    Culinary tourism has been defined as "the intentional, exploratory participation in the foodways of an other.". The culinary tourist is understood as an individual who actively constructs meaning in their experience through an aesthetic appreciation of food. When one travels, one eats, but this does not always mean partaking in culinary ...

  7. Culinary Tourism

    Culinary tourism in this sense includes the vicarious exploration of unfamiliar foods or foodways experiences—the "kitchen table" tourism of viewing food network programs, perusing cookbooks, or reading food blogs—as well as any instances of "eating out of curiosity." 17 Debates around the name of the subject reflect the diversity ...

  8. Culinary tourism and contradictions of cultural sustainability

    As culinary tourism has emerged as a significant and profitable niche within the tourism industry, it is being enlisted to support the sustainability of destinations. ... For discussions of food and sustainability, I developed a "foodways tree" as a visual aide for exploring the motivations and impacts of each individual's food choices ...

  9. PDF Three UNESCOs Journey Route Culinary Tourism Strategy

    Culinary Tourism 10 Current State 26 Improving the Visitor Experience 45 Moving Forward 59 End Notes 63 2 THRE NESCO OURNE OUT ULINAR OURIS TRATEGY ... The relationship between people, place, and food is called "foodways". Foodways are the foundation of culinary tourism and addresses the who, what, where, when, why, and how around food ...

  10. Culinary Tourism

    World historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto suggests a similarly long view of culinary tourism in his book Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food (2002). He identifies eight "revolutions," or paradigmatic shifts in the ways humans use and think about food, including the rise of agriculture and herding, the development of cooking and manners, and long-distance trade and industrialization.

  11. Special issue introduction: culinary tourism across time and place

    Culinary tourism - and cultural tourism more broadly - gained tremendous momentum in the late twentieth century. Despite challenges posed by the global COVID-19 pandemic, culinary tourism continues to thrive as a way to sample other cultures both at home and abroad. Now, more than ever, travelers demand "taste of place" experiences ...

  12. Authentic-Ish: Ramen, Culinary Tourism, and Canadian Foodways

    Drawing on Lucy M. Long's concept of "culinary tourism," I consider how ramen restaurants function as tourism not only for consumers of ramen, but also for the people who cook and serve it. ... Digest: A Journal of Foodways & Culture Article Publishing Agreement The Foodways Section of the American Folklore Society (the "Publisher") and ...

  13. Culinary Tourism. By Lucy M. Long, ed. (Lexington ...

    Pp. Vii + 322, index, ISBN 0520238311) PDF. This volume of twelve essays edited by Lucy M. Long brings together an impressive collection of established and emerging foodways scholars. In defining and developing the concept of culinary tourism, it is an important publication. The book opens with a short foreword by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Kimblett ...

  14. Attracting Culinary Tourists

    Food tourism, and gastronomy tourism are other labels for culinary tourism, with one term being used over another depending on the destination; for example, gastronomy tourism is more often used in Europe. ... So, if you offer a culinary tourism experience, foodways are an important piece of the puzzle. Think about the suppliers you support ...

  15. Projects

    Over the last decade, the Culinary Tourism Alliance has worked collaboratively with many levels of government, countless destination marketing organizations, industry associations, as well as educational and research Institutions to grow food tourism in their regions. ... (MCC), CTA developed a food trail showcasing the diverse foodways of ...

  16. Culinary Tourism

    ""From Kosher Oreos to the gentrification of Mexican cusine, from the charismatic cook of Basque communities in Spain and the United States to the mainstreaming of southwestern foodways, Culinary Tourism maps a lively cultural and intellectual terrain."" -- from the foreword by Barbara Kirshenblatt-GimblettCulinary Tourism is the first book to consider food as both a destination and a means ...

  17. Ontario: where culinary tourism opportunities abound

    Ontario is well positioned to be a leader in the culinary tourism sector, which is estimated to be worth US$1.8 billion by 2027. The result was that Ontario became one of three worldwide leaders in culinary tourism readiness, according to the World Food Travel Association. And it remains a culinary "hotspot," based on the level of culinary ...

  18. 2024 Hanna Geldrich-Leffman Colloquium to focus on global foodways

    This year's Hanna Geldrich-Leffman Colloquium will feature the theme "Global Foodways: The Intersections of Food Politics and Cultural Identity," on Wednesday, April 10, 2024, in the 4th Floor Program Room in the Andrew White Student Center on Loyola's Evergreen campus.

  19. Great Taste of Canada

    The Great Taste of Canada is a nation-wide cooperative program by the Culinary Tourism Alliance as part of our national culinary and agritourism development and marketing efforts. ... destinations, sector organizations, and tourism stakeholders put their brands front and centre to amplify the foodways unique to their region. You need to be part ...

  20. Canada Culinary

    Dec 4, 2023. The Great Taste of Canada Holiday Gift Guide 2023. Oct 26, 2023. Get A Taste Of The Arctic While In Nunavut. Oct 18, 2023. Traditional Indigenous Foods in Every Region of the Northwest Territories. AD (250x250) AD (250x250) AD (250x350) AD (250x350)

  21. UTSA and TTU Press seek writers for new indigenous foodways book series

    The new series, titled "Indigenous Foodways of Texas and Northern Mexico," will explore, preserve and propagate Indigenous food traditions, techniques and histories. The partners are seeking projects that focalize the food confluences among people in Texas and the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León and Tamaulipas.

  22. 'Hey, I grew that': the Native American school that's decolonizing foodways

    In the Umoⁿhoⁿ Nation, teens learn about nutrition and build tribal sovereignty by farming for their school and community Before joining her school's gardening program this year, 14-year-old ...

  23. 2024 'Southern Arizona Food Heroes' Nominations Are Now Open

    The nonprofit Tucson City of Gastronomy (TCOG) just announced a call for nominations for the second annual Southern Arizona Food Heroes.. This year's awards have two categories: "Food Visionary" and "Jim Griffith Foodways Keeper." "For the second year, we are partnering with Si Charro, the Southwest Folklife Alliance, and the University of Arizona Southwest Center to recognize ...

  24. CenterWell Senior Primary Care grand opening on March 20, 2024

    Join CenterWell Senior Primary Care in Eagledale on March 20, 2024, for a grand opening event featuring tours, live music, food, and giveaways. More Videos. Next up in 5. Example video title will go here for this video. Next up in 5. Example video title will go here for this video.

  25. National tourism agency selects three leading festivals for support program

    More in Food & Travel. National tourism agency selects three leading festivals for support program. South Jeolla's regional festivals hope to go global. Five Korean eateries make extended list of Asia's 50 Best Restaurants. Michael Schmid announced as Four Seasons Hotel Seoul's new general manager

  26. Let's countdown to Songkran in Thailand 2024, the UNESCO-listed

    The official site of Tourism Authority of Thailand. Amazing Thailand, Travel information, Travel guide, maps, hotels, accommodation, attractions, events & festivals, food, culture, shopping information to help you plan your Thailand vacations.

  27. Two Top Hotels In Bangkok, Where Tourism Is Skyrocketing

    First, Riverside has city day tours with its "Klong Guru," (klong means canal) using a private boat to visit important temples, artists studio and even do city food tours.

  28. Hotels near Tourist Information Center Orekhovo-Zuyevo

    Orekhovo-Zuevo Tourism Orekhovo-Zuevo Hotels Orekhovo-Zuevo Bed and Breakfast Flights to Orekhovo-Zuevo Orekhovo-Zuevo Restaurants Things to Do in Orekhovo ... Two beaches. Might be a good place to stay in hot summer weather. Food is Post-Soviet - not terrible, just... " 4. Hotel Berezhki Hall. Show prices. Enter dates to see prices. 135 reviews.

  29. Electrostal History and Art Museum

    Tortuga Island Anhinga Trail Le Bois de Boulogne TRM - Thika Road Mall Hungarian State Opera House (Magyar Allami Operahaz) Museu de la Xocolata Trenitalia Frecciarossa Alligator Alley Old Arcade Small-group Milan Highlights e-Bike Tour SoHo, Little Italy, and Chinatown Walking Tour in New York Sri Lanka Tour, Kandy to Ella by Tuk-tuk and Train Nordnes Walking Tour: Bergen's History & Charming ...

  30. RESTAURANT GLOBUS, Elektrostal

    Share. 67 reviews #2 of 28 Restaurants in Elektrostal $$ - $$$ European Contemporary Vegetarian Friendly. Fryazevskoye Hwy., 14, Elektrostal Russia + Add phone number + Add website + Add hours Improve this listing. See all (2) Enhance this page - Upload photos! Add a photo. Food.