Culinary Tourism (review)

Culinary Tourism is a welcome and provocative addition to the literature on foodways and tourism. An anthology of essays by food scholars from different disciplines about a multifaceted subject, it treats food as both a destination and a means for tourism. Although the body of literature on tourism is large, scholars have for the most part ignored the culinary aspect of travel. Exploring uncharted territory, Culinary Tourism contributes new models for research and suggests contexts for its study. However, the publication’s sweeping inclusion of what constitutes culinary tourism might cause some to pause.

In Long’s view, food can be seen as “a subject and medium, [both a] destination and [a] vehicle, for tourism” (p. 20). The book treats tourism as a voluntary venture for the sake of new experiences, a “process and a way of approaching an object or activity, rather than a category of behavior” (p. 6). Long defines culinary tourism as “the intentional exploratory participation in the foodways of another—participation including 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” (p. 21). Exploration and intentionality are keys to her definition. Whereas tourism is commonly regarded as exploration beyond one’s home area, culinary tourism as it is understood here does not necessitate travel. According to the editor, one can be a culinary tourist when, for example, patronizing local ethnic restaurants, looking through a cookbook, cooking a recipe from another food culture, or walking through a local ethnic grocery store. Long states that “culinary tourism is more than trying new and exotic foods” (p. 1), and the collective strength of this anthology is the meaning and significance attributed to the wide range of foods and culinary experiences it explores. Eve Jochnowitz’s “Flavors of Memory,” for example, examines the role of Jewish food in Cracow, Poland, intended for both foreign (Jewish) visitors and non-Jewish Poles living in Poland. “Incorporating the Local Tourist at the Big Island Poke Festival” by Kristin McAndrews discusses the sampling by local Hawaiians of variations in poke, a dish that reflects Hawaii’s cultural and ethnic diversity. Riki Salzman looks at culinary tourism in the Catskills, where tourists seek comfort in the familiar, and Barbara Shortridge considers two American ethnic theme towns and the role food plays in their tourism.

Long organizes the essays into three sections: “Culinary Tourism in Public and Commercial Contexts,” “Culinary Tourism in Private and Domestic Contexts,” and “Culinary Tourism in Constructed and Emerging Contexts.” The essays range from Poland, the Basque country, and Mexico to the mainland United States and Hawaii. In the foreword, Barbara Kirshenblatt- Gimblett argues that the question of authenticity is essential to culinary tourism (p. xii), and the issue is taken up in each of the book’s chapters. It is, for example, a central theme in Jennie Germann Molz’s “Tasting an Imagined Thailand,” a case study of Thai restaurants in Texas that explores culinary authenticity as a mutually negotiated concept between tourists’ perceptions and the restaurant’s presentation of itself as an “other.” Authenticity is also key in Jeffery Pilcher’s “From ‘Montezuma’s Revenge’ to ‘Mexican Truffles,’” a study of the development of culinary tourism in Mexico.

Each article in this anthology is an interesting study of foodways, if not of culinary tourism. The authors attempt to apply Long’s definition of culinary tourism to their data, but some articles extend beyond intentional exploration of the other, and a few, albeit fascinating encounters with food of the other seem inappropriate to this volume. For example, Jill Terry Rudy’s article about her experience with Guatemalan food as a Mormon missionary contradicts Long’s premise that tourism satisfies one’s curiosity about others through intentional exploration. If intent is basic to the definitional criteria, what qualifies missionary work as culinary tourism? While Amy Bentley’s well-researched study on the creolization of Southwest cuisine is a significant contribution to foodways scholarship, it is not about...