We eat when we travel. But we can also travel to eat. “Culinary tourism,” a term first suggested by scholar Lucy Long describes the idea of tourists experiencing other cultures through food. Food is both a destination and a vehicle for tourism.
Traveling for food has become increasingly the purpose of exploring and enjoying a destination’s food and beverage. Tourism websites list gastronomic experiences such as cooking schools, wineries, restaurants, and food festivals to target this growing sector of travelers. Beyond the classic food meccas (France and Italy), other regions are promoting their food offerings and drawing international attention. Both Singapore and Hong Kong claim to be the “food capital of Asia,” with the latter boasting 9,000 restaurants and the former attracting celebrity chefs like Jamie Oliver, Mario Batali, and Gordon Ramsey, who have established successful restaurants in the city.
Yet, we don’t even have to leave home to “travel.” Food magazines, cookbooks, and food guidebooks orient the reader to particular foods, dishes, and cuisines, and their histories, their locales, and their cultures. Bon Appetit features food of Oaxaca, London, Seoul, Taiwan, and Tofino as destinations for tourism in its May 2017 issue. Similarly, Food & Wine‘s special Travel Issue in May 2017 created a “global bucket list” of hotels and resorts offering unique food experiences, from Tel Aviv to Tennessee to Tasmania. These publications include recipes, whether read for pleasure or actually performed in the kitchen, that prompt us to re-live travel experiences in rich sensory detail. They also enable us to experience vicariously the cuisines of others.
While food evokes memories, food also provides a more tangible way to linger and relish the moment. As folklore scholar Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett asks: “What is it about food that distinguishes culinary tourism from tourism in general? Not only do food experiences organize and integrate a particularly complex set of sensory and social experiences in distinctive ways, but also they form edible chronotypes (sensory space-time convergences). The capacity of food to hold time, place, and memory is valued all the more in an era of hypermobility, when it can seem as if everything is available everywhere, all the time.” Food gives you a sense of existence, a feeling of the moment that cannot be replaced—be it a perfect avocado in California or a hazelnut gelato in Florence.
And, remember, you don’t even have to like the food to make it a worthwhile experience. Tourism and hospitality industries design experiences that introduce us to the unfamiliar. New experiences push us, because they unsettle what we take for granted. These cultural shocks add spice to life through the surprise of the unexpected and unplanned. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett says, “culinary tourism is shock treatment.” Through food, the everyday becomes unfamiliar, and the unfamiliar familiar. The power of food reconciles differences and brings us closer together, from across the kitchen table or around the world.
Here are ways to add delicious experiences to your next trip or to a free afternoon at home.
- Take a local cooking class.
- Try a specialty dish, like Spanish paella.
- Buy food souvenirs, both practical and popular gifts. Sip pisco, a brandy distilled from wine grapes, the national drink of Peru, to relive your visit to a pisco distillery in Lima.
- Explore a local food market; the tuna auction at Tokyo’s Tsukiji Fish Market, one of the world’s largest fish markets, is serious business.
- Compete in food competitions, ramp up your porridge recipe for the World Porridge Making Championship in the Scottish Highlands, winner takes home the coveted Golden Spurtle.
- Read restaurant recommendations.
- Own a Michelin Guide.
- Write restaurant reviews on Yelp.
- Post pictures of the restaurant on Instagram.
- Go on a wine tour. Tuscan vineyards, anyone?
- Visit food museums, like Museum of Food and Drink (MOFAD) in New York City.
- Attend food and drink festivals. Consider going to South Beach Wine & Food Festival (SOBEWFF) which attracts more than 65,000 mega-foodies each spring.
- Seek out renowned restaurants, from elusive (and now closed) El Bulli in Spain to pioneering and seasonally-forward Chez Panisse in California.
- Visit food and beverage factories, like Hershey’s Chocolate World and Ben & Jerry’s Factory Tour.
- Support local breweries.
- Explore liquor trails, like Scotland’s malt whisky trail.
- Watch travel cooking shows, Anthony Bourdain and Andrew Zimmern have many tv food travel shows where they taste for you foods you would never dare
- Listen to food podcasts. Broadcasting since 1994, The Splendid Table shares stories and recipes about food.
- Read cookbooks.
- Cook new and different foods.
- Eat and embrace other foods with enthusiasm.
