Andrea MacMichael

Food and Travel Seminar

10/19/16

Culinary Tourism Reading Response

            One of the largest themes I found in this reading about culinary tourism was authenticity of food. It is evident that food serves as a means for experiencing a culture. We consume food not only for nourishment, but for emotional reasons as well. Lucy Long points out that we eat to feel connected to our own heritage, we eat to feel connections with others, and we often eat when we travel in order to experience something “different” and new. In this way, tourism and the culinary fields are interconnected. I found it interesting to learn about how food can serve as identity, and how our motivations to eat food and the ways in which food is presented to us can influence its perceived authenticity.

            In reading about the “other” in Lucy Long’s piece, I was surprised by the idea of turning the exotic into the familiar. I realize now that this is something people constantly try to do: we long to expose ourselves to different cultures or ways of living and eating, but we have to make accommodations in order to make the experience more familiar and less exotic to what we perceive as normal in our own lives. For instance, some Korean restaurants advertise “bulgogi” as “grilled beef strips” rather than using the ethnic name to bring in customers that are not as knowledgeable about Korean cuisine. Every individual enters a new restaurant with one’s own idea about what the food “should be.” We generalize so many regions with the mention of a single dish, such as lobster for Maine or tacos for Texas, when there is so much more to a culture or region and what they eat. In essence, it seems that whether what we receive at a restaurant is authentic cuisine is a completely individual assessment. Especially in the United States, there are thousands of variations on different food dishes from other countries or other regions that each represent different cultures. Personally, I want to be able to experience these cultures, such as the California-Mexican culture and cuisine and the Texas-Mexican culture and cuisine that Ashley described in her report, because each are unique.

This reading made me consider that we must be aware of not only our own conceptions of another culture, but also the methods that restaurants and food stores impose on the food we eat. Restaurants manipulate menus to cater to the type of customers they expect to have, even if that means substituting local/regional ingredients over those used in the original cuisine, which can mislead consumer understanding of what a country’s food “is.” As presented in “Tasting and Imagined Thailand,” restaurants even use décor that may be more culturally unique than the food and food preparation itself. I found this section of the reading provocative for its detail of ways in which restaurants employ authenticity.

Overall, I was intrigued by the connections made between food, culture, and tourism in this reading. It is clear that food shapes more of our perception of culture than we realize. Food and tourism are dynamic ideas that are constantly influencing our beliefs, and integrating us into societies and lifestyles other than our own.