Eating, drinking and travelling for fun. Backward to ‘Tourism and Gastronomy’ and forward to the Covidocene

In T&G, Kevin Fields (2002, p. 38) predicted that the increasing concern of Westerner consumers with health and safety would benefit destinations that publicise the nutritional virtues of their food traditions. He mentioned the competition between the Mediterranean diet (MD) promoted by Greece and Italy and its Atlantic alternative from the north-western area of Portugal (see also Beer et al. 2002, p. 218). It is relevant to analyse here how the rise of the MD contributed to the emergence of gastronomic tourism.

As everyone knows, it was a researcher from the University of Minnesota named Ancel Keys who revealed to the world the existence of this food tradition within the framework of the Seven Countries epidemiological study (Keys et al., 1980). This long-term enquiry confirmed the exceptionally low rate of mortality from coronary accidents along the European coast of the Mediterranean in the early post-war period (Dernini et al. 2012, p. 78). However, what had led him to make this ‘discovery’ is almost forgotten today. During his lifetime the scientist would repeatedly declare that his experiences as a tourist in Italy had been decisive. The book Eat Well and Stay Well, published in 1959 with his wife Margaret, is largely inspired by their escapades in the south of Europe. No reference is made yet to MD in this text, but most of the recipes are already borrowed from the Italian, French and Spanish repertoire. The couple claimed that the Americans’ diet had deteriorated over the last decades because of economic growth and technological progress. They mentioned that the food on sale in their country now contained too many chemical additives and synthetic substances produced industrially, such as hydrogenated fat (Keys & Keys 1959, pp. 54, 56, 111). This being the case, they dedicate much of their nutritional guide to the preparation of specialties from less developed areas of the planet, which they consider more natural and salutary. Readers are also encouraged to discover local gastronomy when travelling abroad (Keys & Keys 1959, pp. 129–130).

It was precisely during this same period that the tourism sector was confronted for the first time with the humanist values that a young institution – the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, better known today as UNESCO – had assumed as a mission to promote. The rapprochement with the International Union of Official Tourism Organizations in 1951 was definitively formalised by the participation at the World Tourism Conference in Rome in 1963. The creation of the World Heritage List (WHL) in 1972 would be the culmination of the convergence between these two areas of governmentality (Cousin 2008).

The popularity of Eat Well and Stay Well, published at a time when UNESCO was embracing the cause of what would later be called ‘cultural tourism’, was an important step for elevating the culinary to the status of a full-fledged element of recreational travels in a few decades. The interest of Americans in foreign F&B goes back a little further, however, already being considered as an attraction for those who visited France in the 1930s, despite what some authors believe (Levenstein 2004, p. 38). In the preface of the Keys’ volume, Paul White refers to his compatriots who roamed the ‘province’ in the inter-war period, a gastronomic guide in hand, looking for the countryside flavours. The doctor recalls his 1932 excursion to Belley, the birthplace of Brillat-Savarin, and across the Dordogne, along a route lined with Michelin-starred restaurants (Keys & Keys 1959, pp. 7–8). The popularity of the Keys’ book may be due in part to this pre-existent interest in exogenous cuisine among the elite milieu of their own homeland, to which the authors explicitly allude in the introduction (Keys & Keys 1959, pp. 19). However, the idea of associating a healthy diet with a specific geographical space would only come later. Indeed, it took until 1975, after the publication of Eat Well and Stay Well: The Mediterranean Way (Keys & Keys 2006), before the culinary traditions of the underdeveloped regions of Italy, South France, Spain and Greece were permanently transformed into the ‘Mediterranean diet’, a nutritional model of universal value mirroring the puritan rejection of food modernity (Levenstein 2012, p. 137).

This precedent would be the foundation stone of the instantaneous popularity of the MD pyramid, created by epidemiologists in the early 1990s, based on the Seven Countries Study (Willett et al. 1995). The Italian adventure of the first ‘celebrity scientist’ and his wife would inspire an increasing number of fortunate compatriots to seize the opportunity of sojourning abroad to taste humble dishes belonging to the peasant repertoire, with the purpose of reforming their own diet. During this decade, Tuscany competed with Provence as their favourite destination (Fields 2002, p. 40). The experience researched was evolving too. A growing legion of successful middle-aged men and women now considered holidays in the countryside of northwestern Italy as a rite of passage, letting them improve not only their food habits but also their lifestyle. The adventure abroad would ‘provide a new sense of identity and allow a re-examination and recreation of self’, considering the fact that ‘changing a diet is a metaphor for a renewal of body, mind and spirit’ (Chrzan 2008). In short, gastronomic tourism was turning into an existential quest. In the USA, members of the upper class now looked at the poorest inhabitants of this rural region through the Arcadian representations of the Mediterranean people popularised by the Keys’ most famous books. What Janet Chrzan (2008) calls the ‘Tuscany myth’ was largely broadcast by literature, films, culinary magazines and destination branding in the following years. The attraction for the rustic flavors of food produced by local farmers responded to the growing rejection of heavily processed products. The puritan aversion for ‘unidentified food objects’, which had struck America periodically since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (Silva 2015, pp. 85–120), then spread to the rest of the Western world (Fischler 1995, p. 216; Poulain 2002, p. 22). The romantic vision of the countryside as being stuck in time, authentic and close to nature, would have a long-term impact on the behaviour of tourists. Indeed, what Americans really loved in the Tuscan cuisine was not exactly the fact of it being Mediterranean, but that it was made with fresh products, seasonal and grown locally (Chrzan 2008). Today, in a word, we would say ‘sustainable’. Incidentally, all the characteristics described in T&G's contributions a few years later, which make the cuisine appealing, are already there. The nostalgia of the ‘stress-free rural life’ in opposition to the urban buzz of the postmodern world would prevail in the next decades among the inhabitants of the Western megapolis (Bessières 1998, p. 24; Urry 2002b, pp. 87–88). Soon, the precedent of Tuscany would convince other hinterland zones to follow the recipe of success inaugurated by this Italian province (Kilburn 2018), converting themselves into “touristic terroirs” (Hall & Mitchell 2002a; Hall et al. 2003, p. 34).

The increasing popularity of Tuscany as a destination praised by customers of high standing during the 1990s transformed this region of Italy into a fashionable model for the creation of F&B routes in marginal areas, as already noted in T&G by Magda Corigliano (2002, p. 180). In the chapter dedicated to the Scottish ‘Isle of Arran Taste Trail’, Boyne et al. (2002, p. 92) elected the synergy between hospitality/catering and agro-food sectors engaged in local and regional development as the main driving force of gastronomic tourism, embracing what they called a ‘bi-directional’ approach. Enquiries undertaken in France and the United Kingdom, mentioned by Jones et al. (2002, pp. 115–16) in the next pages, also highlighted this partnership, aimed at connecting producers and consumers within the framework of ‘experience economy’ (Richards 2012, p. 16). Like other researchers of this time (Poulain 1997, pp. 18–19; Hall & Sharples, 2003 p. 2; Hall et al. 2003, p. 26), some of T&G's contributors viewed the cuisine mostly as an opportunity for less attractive zones, generally located in the countryside (Beer et al. 2002, p. 219). For them, the key was the intensification of the interlinking between different kinds of actors interested in this new business area, as noted by Anne-Mette Hjalager (2002) and Magda Corigliano (2002) in the same volume. The belief that endogenous F&B could be the basis for sustainable agro-hubs is still shared today by many stakeholders (Pilar Leal 2018), despite the relative success of this formula elsewhere (Csurgó et al. 2019). However, the increasing demand of gastronomic experiences can only partially be explained by joint initiatives of producers and suppliers operating in the hinterland, as most of these authors postulated in 2002.

To be fair, a few members of the T&G team already pointed to other variables which would effectively define the evolution of this segment of the market in the following years. Even Jones et al. (2002, p. 116) was aware that the interconnection between the tourism of taste and heritage was growing, as was Rosario Scarpato (2002b, p. 136). According to this author, the cultural dimension of F&B was attractive for a new profile of consumers more interested in sensorial experiences instead of the passive contemplation of monuments and museums, which motivated the first faiseurs de tour to visit Italy (Silva 2016a, pp. 25–50). A few years earlier, Jetske van Westering (1999, pp. 76–77) had noted that the increasing interest of travellers in the local customs more and more interlinked with endogenous F&B was triggered by two recent trends in Western societies: the valuation of culinary legacies as a central element of the popular lifestyle and a change in the guests’ attitude. Holidaymakers now gave more importance to other senses, beyond vision, which entailed trying the endogenous F&B (see also Richards 2012, p. 19; Berg & Sevón 2014, p. 9).

The early adhesion of the heritage stakeholders to the cause of environmental preservation would facilitate the approximation between the tourism and agro-food sectors in the next twenty years. The idea disseminated in 1996 by the World Commission for Culture and Development (WCCD 1995, pp. 206–10), that sustainability deals with much more than ecological issues was conquering a growing audience, especially in the arena of leisure mobility (Mowforth et al. 2016, pp. 104–11). It would also rapidly become the new UNESCO mantra (Silva 2016b, pp. 27–28). The increasing rallying around this concept in a wider spectrum of governmentality's fields contributed to turning it into a highly consensual element of the politically correct discourse, so often uncritically invoked, even by scholars (De Jong 2018, pp. 143–44). The tendency to not question the association of ‘authenticity’, ‘local food’ and ‘tradition’ with environmental concerns, already debunked by Scarpato (2002b, p. 140) in T&G, would spread during the next decades to justify development projects based on gastronomic tourism (Matta 2016, p. 346; Tena Meza et al. 2018, p. 62), triggered by the Tuscany precedent. The shared faith in a ‘greener future’ would reinforce multisectoral alliances, to promote specific F&B legacies. These new kinds of networks would become more and more transnational, in certain cases assuming outright the configuration of epistemic communities, as those which quite successfully drafted the MD proposal to the ICHH list from 2005 to 2010 (Silva 2016b). This ‘Mediterranean heritage’ tailored by scientists was presented to UNESCO the same way the ‘Tuscany myth’ was sold earlier to American travellers, the common ingredients being: diet as integral part of a singular lifestyle based on local resources, conviviality, seasonality, and last but not least, the validation of healthy virtues by the endorsement of academics.

Many contributors of T&G were aware of the silent revolution underway. In the preface, Anne-Mette Hjalager and Greg Richards (2002b, p. xii) already mention the Portuguese government's strategic use of gastronomic tourism to safeguard the essence of the national cuisine. F&B traditions would be soon converted into a subcategory of intangible cultural heritage — the so-called culinary ICH — disputed simultaneously as a tool of destination branding and as the backbone of origin labels protected by geographical indications (Xavier Medina 2017, p. 110, Silva 2018), some authors having anticipated this new trend (Ravenscroft & Westering 2002, p. 163; Beer et al. 2002, p. 218). This paradigm shift is already documented in T&G. In the synopsis, the coordinators (Hjalager & Richards 2002a, p. iv) refer to the ‘consumption’ of F&B legacies, even before naming ‘gastronomy’ for the first time. In the introduction, Greg Richards (2002, pp. 3–4) mentions the recent evolution of this notion often used in the volume to designate not only haute cuisine but also the popular foodways and the fact of its being associated to a wider universe of practices, which is precisely how UNESCO defines culinary ICH today (Romagnoli 2019, pp. 163–64).

The promotion of F&B destinations and local products would become the main motivations of a growing number of proposals (Broude 2015, p. 492; Matta 2016, p. 346; Silva 2020) to integrate the inventory funded in 2003, originally instituted to safeguard folklore (UNESCO 2003): the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (ICHH list). Despite a clear paradigm change, the inspiration was the WHL. In theory, it should help local communities protect their collective identity from the impact of globalisation, including mass tourism effects. However, lists, once created, take on their own life and often drift from the objectives for which they were designed, being used for purposes other than those idealised by their founders. In practice, the elevation to the WHL represents a decisive step in increasing the ‘touristification’ of sites that UNESCO recognises as being of exceptional value (Berliner et al. 2013, p. 143). It is considered today as a sort of international award helping to promote destinations, including those with stakes on F&B (Tena Meza et al. 2018). It continues to be in very high demand today despite the economic benefits sometimes clearly falling short of expectations (Cuccia et al. 2016). After 2003, the ICHH list would be primarily seen as the intangible equivalent of the WHL, as Chiara Bortolotto (2011, p. 30) argues. Consequently, it became another opportunity to capture visitors, especially for territories that did not meet the criteria of the 1972 Convention or have the conditions needed for growing by mass tourism (Silva 2016b, pp. 48–51). In a context of increasing interactions between economy and heritage (Cominelli & Greffe 2019), the negative perception of the culture's commodification is still strong in this arena today, regularly generating friction between those who consider the interference of capitalism as a necessary evil and those who do not agree with this concession to the neoliberal agenda (Olivier 2013). From this point of view, UNESCO's actions go against the flow in the last twenty years. This institution leads the way, validating other proposals to the ICHH list, besides the MD, motivated in the first place by commercial interests (Silva 2018). This is on condition, of course, of submitting applications properly written in accordance with the constitutional values flagged by the 2003 Convention (Matta 2016, pp. 349–50).

After 2004, this UN organisation reoriented its position, launching the Creative Cities Network programme to openly reinforce the commitment between heritage stakeholders, food producers and the tourism industry (Pearson & Pearson 2015). The goal of this initiative is to promote urban development, once again in a sustainable manner, based on culture and arts (UNESCO 2016). In the first place, this new endeavour responds to the desire of a growing number of metropolitan actors to also benefit from the increasing demand for unsophisticated cooking (Poulain 2002, p. 22), competing against rural hubs as gastronomic destinations. Modernist chefs, like Ferran Adriá, now claimed that innovation should be strongly anchored in tradition, instead of assimilating creativity to the overtaking of the old ways (Helstosky 2017, p. 54). This shift of paradigm will help fight the negative vision of the megapolis as a ‘culinary Babel’, which mirrors the Arcadian image of poor peasants embodied by the ‘Tuscan myth’.

In his T&G contribution, Rosario Scarpato already presents three successful case studies mining this vein: Melbourne, Singapore and Bologna. The third city, located in northern Italy, had been elected by this author for hosting the ceremony of the Slow Food Award in 2000, with the purpose of exploring culinary legacies as tourism products (Scarpato 2002b, p. 135). The promoter of this event — Slow Food (SF) — is an international organisation, funded in 1986 to fight globalisation, fostering sustainable diets based on local traditions (Richards 2002, p. 7; Scarpato 2002a, p. 66; Scarpato 2002b, p. 135; Hall & Mitchell 2002b, p. 84). In the introduction of T&G, Greg Richards highlights the SF's growth as a signal of the increasing interest for F&B heritage (Richards 2002, p. 16). In this volume, Kevin Fields (2002, p. 46) mentions the close relation between this ONG and the movement of ‘Slow Cities’. He argues that the quieter way of life embraced by the urban communities which adopt this model could also benefit their guests. Even if the T&G contributors do not invoke the ‘slow tourism’ concept explicitly, the idea — which some (MacGrath & Sharpley 2018) believe had been expressed by Jost Krippendorf (1987, p. 10) first — is already there. Like the notion of slow travel popularised a few years earlier (Clancy 2018a; MacGrath & Sharpley 2018), slow tourism was promised a bright future. It was in Germany and Switzerland that the first practical applications of the ‘snail philosophy’ in the field of leisure mobility were recorded under this appellation in the same period by Rafael Matos-Wasem (2004) in a chapter of a book published two years later. This new trend would enjoy continual growth until today (Clancy 2018b), the interlacing between tourism, food heritage, nostalgia and sustainability inaugurated by the precursors of the ‘slow paradigm’ being a constant since then (Corvo & Matacena 2018).

The rise of F&B destinations during this period is also due to the decline of the French hegemony as an international standard of fine dining and the ongoing change in consumption patterns (Csergo 2016). Paris was now nothing more than a gastronomic capital among others. Barcelona rapidly joined this group of emerging foodscapes, taking advantage of the growing notoriety of the Catalan cuisine, its election as the epicentre of the global effort to promote the MD, and later, its inscription in the ICHH list (Silva 2018, p. 580; Silva 2021, pp. 192, 194).

Next, we will see how the increasing popularity of chefs as public figures contributed to amplifying the interest of holidaymakers in experiences related to F&B.

In the T&G chapter entitled ‘Sustainable gastronomy as a tourist product’, Rosario Scarpato (2002b) called attention to the importance of the growing number of festivals involving stakeholders engaged in safeguarding traditional foodways. As Anne-Mette Hjalager (2002, p. 30) noted, the increasing popularity of these kinds of social events had been due in part to the participation of what today we call celebrity chefs. The 1990s was the decade when Michelin award winners like Ferran Adrià and Marco-Pierre White became true ‘rock and roll stars’ (Csergo 2016). These professionals got out of their kitchens for the first time. Henceforth, they would communicate directly with their fans, without the mediation of established gastronomes or the new generation of epicureans, whom Scarpato already calls foodies in T&G (Scarpato 2002a, p. 66). Chefs from other continents, like Gastón Acurio, trained in the French school, in their turn began using innovative cooking and plating methods to reinvent the rustic cuisine of the hinterland (Matta 2016, pp. 342–343, 347), highly appreciated by high-class consumers after the Tuscan Rush.

The shifting point was probably the Global Financial Crisis (Wolf 2019, p. xxx), which inaugurated the golden age of low-cost travel. In the following years, the profile of global ‘culinary brokers’ and their public changed. Since then, there has been no need to be highly trained to gain notoriety. In turn, the connoisseurs capable of judging the technical competences of a kitchen brigade were now the minority of a broader audience. In fact, the celebrity chef was no longer presented as merely being the keeper of a ‘savoir-faire’. He evolved into a sort of guru for aspirants to a life makeover, becoming at the same time an ambassador of destinations able to seduce greedy trippers (Richards 2012, p. 30; Perkins 2017, pp. 4, 6; Hindley et al. 2019, p. 293). If some of them, such as Jamie Oliver, invited the fans to start a gastro-revolution in their own country, others, like Anthony Bourdain or Andrew Zimmern, encouraged them to turn into globe trotters looking for exotic flavours. Both widely disseminated the idea that food is what really defines a location, being an open door to any culture. They broadcast their good words through what the T&G contributors Michael Hall and Richard Mitchell (2002b, p. 79) called a total media package: cookbooks, magazines, radio programmes, TV shows, including those produced by channels exclusively dedicated to cuisine (Hall & Sharples 2003, p. 2; Kivela & Crotts 2006, p. 357). More recently, internet portals, blogs, and later, Facebook and Instagram among other social networks (Ruiz de Lera 2012, p. 121; Wolf 2019, p. xxxi), would take over.

Thanks to chefs like Bourdain and Zimmern, a large audience embraced the idea that tourists should respect cultural diversity and be sensitive to the need to safeguard the identity of the guest communities, according to the directives adopted by UNESCO after the 2003 convention. Speaking as equals to their followers, this new generation of ‘culinary brokers’ inspired vocations between amateurs, turning themselves into ‘proto-celebrities’ (Hindley et al. 2019, p. 293). They gained their own public, sharing their gastronomic quests, both at home and abroad, using the same media as their predecessors. The popularity of TV competitions, like MasterChef, tailored for the UK audience in the 1990s and presently adapted in more than 40 other countries, contributed to reducing the distance between professionals and aficionados since then (Wolf 2019, p. xxxi). Thanks to all these new actors, the foodie culture was already a universal phenomenon when the COVID-19 virus suddenly spread all around the planet.

During the first wave of the COVID pandemic, the confinement experience had a huge impact on our habits. Many of us had never had so much time free, but, unfortunately, not to do anything we wanted. Planting ourselves on the sofa, the flat screen and the laptop became our best friends and often our only connection to the outside world. Erik Wolf (2019, p. xxxi) recently observed that during a crisis ‘people withdraw to what is familiar. As consumers focused more on food and drink, the media caught on.’ This being the case, many of us finally learned to cook, looking to TV programmes, videos, or tutorials, more available online than ever. The selling of recipe books also increased greatly in the last year. We even started to look for manuals explaining how to bake our own bread. Forbidden to fly abroad, we travelled by experimenting with exotic dishes recommended by Instagram influencers and trying anything else the Internet has to offer — culinary courses, tours, festivals, etc. — all at the distance of a click (Garibaldi & Pozzi 2020, pp. 48–49). Then, as well, the sentiment of claustrophobia exacerbated by months of forced isolation had increased the need to reconnect with nature and the desire to come back to the countryside after being authorised again to move freely. After this traumatic parenthesis is finally closed, our lives will never be the same.