Culinary Tourism

Foreword

Foreword Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett Culinary tourism, an exploratory relationship with the edible world, is the subject of this beautifully conceived book. Whether you go to food or food comes to you, the nature of the encounter is what defines a food experience as culinary tourism. Where food is the focus of travel, as in gastronomic tourism, itineraries are organized around cooking schools, wineries, restaurants, and food festivals-in the case of Sardinia, this includes festivals celebrating the sea urchin, mullet, wild boar, chestnuts, or torrone, among others. Food magazines and epicurean guidebooks, which have long celebrated the gastronomic opportunities afforded the mobile eater, orient the reader to particular foods, dishes, and cuisines, their pleasures, their histories, and their locales. Often, these publications include recipes; and, whether read like a musical score or actually performed in the kitchen, such recipes prompt the culinary tourist to relive vividly remembered but ephemeral travel experiences in rich sensory detail, while still offering vicarious travel for the armchair tourist. Even when food is not the main focus of travel, one must eat, regardless of whether or not a memorable experience is the goal. Making experiences memorable is a way the travel industry adds value-and profit-to an essential service such as food. Indeed, the tourism and hospitality industries design experiences, including culinary ones, within the constraints of the tourist's time, space, and means. They do this by making the world an exhibit of itself. A collaboration between highly self-conscious produc- xii I Foreword ers and consumers, culinary tourism is a space of contact and encounter, negotiation and transaction, whether at home or abroad. While the question ofauthenticity does not generallyarisein the course of ordinary life, it is a hallmark of touristic experiences, culinary included. Why, if we do not debate the authenticity of the toast and coffee of our daily breakfast, do we become anxious about the authenticity of an ethnic restaurant or gastronomic travel experience? Restaurants, as several essays in this volume show, are prime sites of designed experiences, collaborativelyproduced. As businesses, not museums (though often similarl , restaurants adapt themselves to their market, including both their customers and their competition. Our preoccupation with their authenticity goes to the heart of the concept of culinary tourism that informs this volume: namely, how self-consciousness arises from encounters with the unfamiliar and challenges what we know-or think we know-about what is before us. What provokes anxiety or delight is our ability to recognize ourselves in what is presented and our uncertainty about the restthat is, the visibility of the seam between the familiar and the unfamiliar, our heightened sense of the distinct components in the mix, and our inability to experience the coalescence as such. While we tend to speak not only of the authenticity of a dish or a restaurant, but also of an authentic experience, without clearly distinguishing them, authentic experience makes the question of authenticity-and debating that question--constitutive of such experience. Not authenticity, but the question of authenticity, is essential to culinary tourism, for this question organizes conversation, reflection, and comparison and arises as much from doubt as from confidence. The ensuing conversation tests and extends one's knowledge and discernment. Whether culinary tourism is inspiring, boring, or frustrating depends on the balance between challenge and mastery, a balance that is recalibrated with the accumulation of experience.! This way of thinking about authenticity is in keeping with the focus of Culinary Tourism on the culinary tourist as an active agent. Culinary tourism creates opportunities to find, test, and push thresholds of the unfamiliar. Newness arises from unpredictability, and culinary tourism, to the degree that it constitutes a break with one's daily routine and even with the predictability of the tourism industry, affords innumerable occasions for new experiences. New experiences expand the ways we create and know ourselves because they dehabituate and estrange much that we take for granted: they unsettle habitus, those embodied dispositions and tacit understandings that require little shocks to come Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett I xiii into consciousness. Culinary tourism is shock treatment. It brings "life" into view through the surprises afforded by the unexpected and the unplanned -"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans/, as John Lennon is to have said. As the essays in this volume so vividly demonstrate, culinary tourism familiarizes the new and estranges the familiar, redrawing their relationship with each...