Tourist Productions 2005

SeaWorld claims dolphin breeding breakthrough

35 minutes ago

SeaWorld San Diego said on Friday it succeeded in selecting the gender of a baby dolphin -- a first that could improve the population of captive sea mammals and reduce the need for new captures.

SeaWorld announced the breakthrough the same day the 2-month old female Atlantic bottlenose dolphin, who does not yet have a name, was introduced to the media.

The mother dolphin, a 26-year-old named Sandy, was artificially inseminated 14 months ago and the calf was born in October.

SeaWorld scientist Justine O'Brien said conservation officials at the park had only recently been able to confirm the calf was indeed female -- the gender scientists had selected -- because it had stayed so close to its mother since birth.

The calf was bred using a sperm-sorting technology developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and a Fort Collins, Colorado, company called XY Inc. Gender-selecting techniques are already used with horses, sheep, cattle and other land animals.

Tom Gilligan of XY Inc. described the dolphin's birth as "a real breakthrough" that would lessen the need for new captures to vary the gene pool of captive marine mammals.

SeaWorld scientists developed an artificial insemination technique to impregnate dolphins, as well as methods to freeze and transport sperm.

Males and females have trouble mixing socially, O'Brien said. So captive dolphins are kept in separate tanks -- and the females are better at living together in groups.

Gastrotourism: BKG's bullet points

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My Slow Food Experience

As Pollan has mentioned in “Cruising on the Ark of Taste,” the globalization and the hectic pace of contemporary society prevent people from appreciating the food that cannot be served quickly on the dinning table. We lost the patience to wait the turkey to grow up at natural pace. Genetic engineering is used to accelerate the process of growth, to create tasteless Broad Breasted white, and at the same time, to push those full of flavor, slow-growing species to the brink of extinction. The Slow Food Movement is a reminiscence of the past as well as an alternative way of living in the world in which the efficiency is over-emphasized.

]]> My food experience is rather different form other typical Taiwanese of my age--it is much slower. Though I was born in a Taiwanese speaking family, my food experience is pretty similar to that of Cantonese immigrants from Southern provinces of China. I was entrusted to a Cantonese nanny in the neighborhood and lived a Cantonese life during the day. My Taiwanese experience was mainly nocturnal for my actual encounter with Taiwanese people, my parents, started around 5pm after they came home from their work place. I never went to a kindergarten to learn the basic arithmetic or mandarin phonemes. As a small child I stayed with my nanny all day and observed Cantonese culinary practices in her kitchen. The “Slow Food Movement” reminds me of my childhood experience fading away in the fast-food-oriented context.

My nanny’s schedule was never hectic. She started her day with a visit to the traditional market to pick up raw materials needed for dishes of the day. I was her not-so-helpful assistant in the chaotic marketplace and, therefore, participated in the process of choosing produce, meat, seafood, as well as spices. After the visit to the market, we returned to her place and started to cook our lunch. If she did not run into to too many familiar faces, we normally got home three or four hours before noon and embarked on the slow food processing, which I cannot recall the details.

The standard lunch for two, that is, for my nanny and me, consisted of a plate of meat/seafood, a plate of vegetable, a side dish, sometimes a small dish of pickled vegetable, and a pot of soup, simmered for approximately three hours before it was places on the table. I rarely have such slowly prepared Cantonese style lunch after I officially entered elementary school. Cantonese slow food experience fades away in my memory over time.

Now, I am more adapted to the fast-food idea prevailing in the society and stop complaining about my mother’s super efficient cooking method. However, I firmly believe that my encounter with Cantonese slow food in childhood was a precious experience for the whole thing was about savoring the culture embodied in the culinary practices passed on for generations, migrated from another part of china. To some extent, I visited that part of China and experienced their culinary culture in this sense.

Preserving turkey heritage

Culinary tourism’s capacity to provide a surrogate for travel seems based on food’s capacity to carry place through the taste buds. In her forward to Culinary Tourism, Barbara seems to locate the power of food to embody place in the realm of memory. Food is a mnemonic device, indeed capable of bringing place to life by providing a sensual experience. The world is, therefore, contained in this “edible map” composed of “edible chronotopes” (xiii).

]]> If anyone is interested, an anthropologist, David Sutton, explores this power of food to carry place through an ethnographic study of greek immigrants’ relationship to food, and their way of bringing “home” and “home memories” with them through the arts of their kitchens. (the book is called Rememberance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory). Although his work is about immigration and not about tourism (although we might argue that immigration is a type of tourism), Sutton’s work locates food’s chronotopic power not only in the taste buds, but in the social practices around food (for example, preparing the meal, telling food stories from the past, table manners, conversations during meals, etc.).

The relationship between culture, locality and food is certainly evident, but I wonder about whether or not food can be heritage as it is consumed in situ, in the present, or does it have to be dead or dying to be valued as such. The piece on the Slow Food Movement seems to point to the latter. Only when the non-white breasted turkeys were on the verge of extinction were they seen as needing preservation in a rhetoric that is very reminiscent of heritage discourse. Not to mention that a European organization, not the Native American communities that raised, prepared and ate them, is the bearer of the food as heritage flag.

Is the Slow Food Movement not also standardizing and universalizing local heritage, and therefore expropriating it, much like the UNESCO Heritage of Humanity lists? (Here it is interesting to mention that the latest candidate for intangible heritage recognition is Mexican “traditional” cuisine). Is food tangible or intangible heritage if it is heritage at all? How does culinary innovation/fusion fit into the picture? Also, perhaps we could talk about the fascinating paradox that Pollan mentions in his article: food as heritage needs to be consumed in order to be preserved.

Eating in the Dark

Forgot to mention this restaurant in Switzerland, called The Blind Cow, that is in complete dark, so that guests have the experience of what it means to be blind. THe food is not outstanding, but the thing is that you have to find your utensils in the dark, use your knife in the dark, drink from the right glass... the waiters are blind, and they wear noisy bracelets to announce themselves...
more (in German) there:
Restaurant website
http://www.blindekuh.ch/
Review
http://www.wildwritingwomen.com/zine/features/europe/butler_blindcow.html
NPR segment
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4529325

late entry for 'Sense and Place'!

Apologies for this really late entry – something I missed some weeks back, and did not want to remain ‘voiceless’ on and so here’s my two cents on it. Edward’s Casey’s article ‘Between Geography and Philosophy’ is an interesting insight into the relationship between self and place.

]]> The way we conceptualize a place and experience it is not a given but is influenced and determined by its relationship and conversation with the place not necessarily in a conscious way. The Surveillance camera tour elucidates an ‘uncertain’ or an overtly ‘care-less’ relationship between self and place, geography, space and agency. I am particularly interested in the affectual dimensions of this relationship, as in how a place is actually sensed and felt, and how these senses are critical in the self’s construction of place. Steven Feld writes about how places are sensed and senses are placed – “as places make sense, senses make place”.

In my research of the Hornbill Festival which I have not yet had the opportunity to attend, there are two kinds of music that are performed – traditional folk music in the day and in the same space in the evenings, western rock and popular music with electric live bands. The experience and the sense of the place and the festival indeed – the relationship of self to place differs for the Naga youth particularly, in the day the space is an offering to a constructed heritage and a reiteration of one’s idealised identity. Whereas in the evening, the same youth experiences the space actively participate in the music, socialize and enjoy. The bodily experience within the same geographical space is sensed sonically and determines the experience. Feld calls this the acoustemology of place, in that the experience of place potentially can always be grounded in an acoustic dimension. The visitors at the festival perhaps are oriented in their experience of the space by other sensory dimensions not necessarily the ‘acoustemology’ of the space. The relationship of sense and place is definitely an important and overlooked inquiry.

These readings definitely open up more doors of exploration for my research. What is it that I am experiencing and what are the other possibilities and perspectives, what agency, what unseen limitations and unconscious determinants are there between the self and place. What are the psychogeographic responses and reactions to a place, what is the orienting factor of the experience?

Movement and Food

The Slow Food Movement shows how something as commonplace as food can take on strong political ramifications. It also shows it is not simply the food which is important but that which it represents: the culture, lifestyle, identity, or heritage behind the food.
When I think of the relationship between politics and food, as the Slow Food movement initiated, I immediately think about the annual spiritual lecture within yoga class about vegetarianism.

]]> It is not a topic they preach often, for although on the yogic path to enlightenment, they still have to be mindful of their paying audience and vegetarianism is often viewed as radical. This year’s lecture came last Thursday. The topic of the lecture was that it takes bravery to commit oneself to acting for the benefit of others. “Others” obviously went beyond humans. With only 6 billion humans on earth, Uma pointed out that we consume some 25 billion animals annually. One million dollars, she stated, creates a tower about two feet high; one billion dollars is higher than the empire state building so with this metaphor she demonstrated how unimaginably violent it is to kill 25 billion animals. Like the Slow Food Movement, to Uma and to the rest of the yoga community, food consumption, although a basic need, is not a mindless act but should be considered for its global, environmental, energetic impact on this organism called the universe. (What about water? Do we inflict pain or cultural negligence upon the world’s water organism by consuming it without regard? There are organizations to protect the world’s water supply but that seems to be in order to consume more of it. Are there any political groups that propose we stop drinking water or that we drink it differently?)

Defined by BKG in the introduction to Culinary Tourism, as events where food is the focus of travel, I tried to think of culinary tourism I had participated in. What I realized though is that I could not think of any travel experience of mine that food was not a primary concern. Every place on the map conjures up a food representative of that place that would need to be tasted in order to have fully achieved the experience of place. Food is a thematic descriptor of culture, but more easily recognizable as a thematic description of place. When I went to Italy I had to get gelato, when I went to Morocco I had to have harira Soup, when in France, cheese and baguettes…. and so forth. Last week in Puerto Rico, my friends insisted on finding a not so easy to find rice and beans restaurant. Our mind’s image of the food representative of a certain place is not always predicated on the actual food of the place. What factors determine the strength of correlation between a place and food? Why did I go to Italy knowing the generalized conception that pasta and pizza would be available there but in Morocco I learned of the foods common there. Why do some countries get culinary representation in the American landscape while others don’t?

Where it gets particularly interesting, is when place does not determine food and the location where this is most visible is none other than New York City. New York City represents culinary tourism at its greatest hybrid variety. When my parents came to town, they had to go to “Sammy’s Romanian” a Jewish shtetl like dining experience that combines Klezmer Music, Frozen Vodka, and Fat enhanced chopped liver, with Egg Creams for dessert. Could one get an egg cream in the shtetl? Or was this culinary tourism of a constructed nature with inherent migration and assimilation built into the cultural identity displayed for digest? My parents traveled from Michigan to New York and part of the tourist experience of New York was to further travel (back in time and across in place) through an imagination process instigated by a meal.

Relegated to the land of senses as opposed to intellect, culinary considerations become highly malleable factors for tourist productions. Within the web of Sepharad 92 events, which commemorated Jewish expulsion from Spain, or outward movement, dinners were held that served Sephardic Food, festivals were arranged that offered Sephardic food, and a cookbook was published of Sephardic food. Sephardic food in this context was considered to be that which was cooked by Iberian Jews previous to the 1492 expulsion and cuisine was used to chart movement away from place. In an article published in 2002 (just ten years after the expulsion anniversary) titled “A Cuisine Returns After Centuries of Exile,” the author uses Sephardic cooking to chart movement into place. Goodman states, “Jews finally began returning to Spain in the early decades of the 20th century” and with them, they brought back Spanish cuisine transformed into Sephardic cuisine by the influence of the host countries that accepted them post expulsion. Also, efforts to “preserve a sense of Sephardic identity” within contemporary Spain takes place in the framework of food. In the once Jewish town of Girona, a Spanish Jewish group called the Red de Juderias de Espana formed to sponsor events and workshops related to Spanish Jewish cooking. In this sense, dynamics of site, exile, heritage construction, and food collaborate to represent cultural changes that reflect historical movements of people.

What this article and the notion of New York as a culinary tourism breeding ground have in common, is the relationship to moving people. Although the movement was forced in the instance of Spanish Jews, there seem to be interesting correlations to make between migration patterns of people or more generally movement, and culinary events. Food is proxy for place and people take place with them when they move.

Another idea I wanted to put out there that I don’t have time to fully think through or work in because I have to get back to Sepharad 92, but seems interesting……. is wine tasting tourism. Wine countries as they are called, invite tourists to travel within their nations without borders. Tourists travel from vineyard to vineyard collecting tastes, similar to the way medieval man made pilgrimage collecting religious experience. Modern religion in the sense of the wine pilgrimage becomes that of breeding cultural capital within oneself. Cultural capital takes the place of spiritual devotion to god.

pierogi on my mind

A few summers ago I spent some time in Greece. When sitting down in a terrace of a restaurant, I would wait at least 20 minutes for the waiter to leisurely bring the menu over. This may have seemed peculiar at first, but after several restaurant outings with my Greek friends, I soon grew extremely fond of the slow and relaxed pace of life. So much so, that I vowed to observe the same pace upon my return to New York. I imagined that there too, I would spend luxuriously long and slow hours talking to friends in restaurants while savoring fresh well prepared food. Needless to say my naiveté was about to rupture. BKG’s notion of “immobility of coalescence” is true not only of the taste of food and wine, which never tastes the same when transported to another location, but also of ambiance.

]]> I was really enjoying reading “Cruising the Ark of Taste,” until I got to the discussion of turkey insemination. I don’t eat turkey but now I understand why the few turkey sandwiches I’ve had in my life always tasted so bad. It’s back to vegetarianism for me. While an admirable theory Slow Food is feasible in very particular circumstances. Putting the philosophy into practice in New York is quite the task. In a city where everyone is in a hurry, scheduling a Slow Food feast with friends may be possible, under the stipulation that you are not enrolled in a one-year graduate program. Unless, of course you happened to take Raul’s summer course where we cooked for grades.

I wish I could spend more time savoring the articles, but I have to wolf something down so I can get back to working on my paper.

Rumbly in my tumbly...as long as I get to pay!

While nibbling on yesterday’s readings, I (perhaps predictably) found myself growing rather hungry. How I would have loved to leave the delightful Bobst and go spend 3 hours eating a five-course meal! Alas, this was not to be the case. However, whisking my focus from my growling stomach to the grating gears of my mind, I was able to fry up several questions that I hope will lead to some tasty conversation.

]]> In Cruising on the Ark of Taste, Michael Pollan’s discussion of the “slow food movement” got me thinking about other preservation organizations such as UNESCO, and several questions quickly followed, spicing up my appreciation of the “slow foods movement.” I was first impressed by the skill with which SLM was able to make their preservation efforts both pleasurable and commercially viable by catering to the hedonistic desires of culinary tourists and adding profitable products to the food market. By utilizing a complex web of outlets and marketing devices, such as local “peasant” food producers, who inherently provide an air of the exotic, small commercial food producers, upscale catalogues such as Williams-Sonoma, and high profile chefs, the SLM is able to simultaneously generate demand for their products, make money, and help ensure the continued existence and production of endangered products. If this is not already being done, I wonder how organizations like UNESCO might be able to frame other heritage practices in such a way as to make them profitable. I don’t like to think of a practice’s survival being entirely dependent upon commercial viability, but sadly, this largely seems to be the case. (Disagreement anyone?)
Thinking about the commercial with a specific eye to the culinary, I found myself returning to a question that I’ve had come up before. Why is the touristic desire for experience seemingly always bound up with commercialism? Why don’t people create their own experiences? This question has particular resonance for culinary tourism for several reasons. First, we should note a unique attribute of culinary tourism and the sense of taste. To taste a food is an ephemeral and individual experience that can be brought to the tourist, rather than being traveled to, though setting does often add something to the experience. Unlike a tourist site, food experiences cannot be photographed, recorded, duplicated, or transcribed into language to the degree than other sites can. There are too many variables in the production of the product, and the eater’s palate. Seeing a picture and reading a description of a Naragansett turkey is less satisfying than reading a description and seeing a reproduction of the Mona Lisa. However, one can cook a Naragansett in the comfort of his home. He needn’t go to Paris to find one. This being so, and one of the primary joys of tourism and culinary tourism in particular being to “unsettle habitus…. familiarize the new and estrange the familiar (BKG 1-2), why do so many people feel the need to pay others for the pleasure, when they could provide it for themselves and their friends and family? My question extends to tourism in a more general sense as well. If the essential tourist attraction is new and unfamiliar experiences, why does paying for these experiences seem to be required as well? One could have an unlimited number of new experiences in her own home or hometown. These experiences could be equally, or more, strange and exciting than those provided by travel. However, “tourists” appear to have two desires that conflict with this. First, as Bruner briefly describes, is the desire to take part in a community and communal narrative. Apparently, we would rather see and experience the same attractions as everyone else rather than have our own unique experiences. Secondly, it seems that there’s something very important about paying for the experience. What does the commercial exchange offer? A record and a quantitative rather than qualitative value for the experience? Does requiring one to save up and work towards the experience have something to do with it? Contribute to the pre-trip narrative as Bruner might say? I find all of these to be interesting questions, that can potentially lead to the root of why we love to be tourists while simultaneously mocking the group to which we belong.

If it's about pleasure -- then I'm there! But seriously . . .

I am all for Slow Food – if it’s about pleasure – then I’m there! But seriously, or not so seriously, I too experienced the change of heart that Pollan experienced when I read about Slow Food. At first I was ambivalent – I mean, a movement called “Slow Food” about enjoying good food – are we just forming another activist group so that people can feel like they’re “doing something”? But then, as I read, I thought “Well, why not fight the globalism capitalist beast with the basics – and enjoying food is defiantly one of the basics of life.” So really what’s there not to like. I agree it’s good to eat slowly, to enjoy your food – it feels better and plus it is better for you. And just thinking about these turkeys who can’t fly or reproduce themselves, one of which I ate on Thanksgiving, makes me move than happy to try out the Narragansett variety - especially since it’s a tastier bird!

]]> My question is – where is the middle ground? I mean, are the only two choices -- McDonalds or a five-course Italian meal. Not all of use have the time or money to sit outside by the piazza with our wine and enjoy the two hour meal. What about the quick yet delicious tofu stir-fry? Or the every tasty Mexican omelet? Where do such quick, easy, cheap and healthy dishes rank on the Slow Food list ‘o edibles? Is it a question of whether I use non GMO soy in my stir-fry?
On that note – I’m going to saute some veggies!

Say hello to Rice Burger!

You might find hard to believe, but in McDonald’s Taiwan, we have rice burgers. Yap! You got it right, the rice burgers. What they do is that they replace the bun part with rice and use some fillings that sautéed in asian style (like beef with teriyaki sauce, or chicken.). It is a local product developed by McDonald’s Taiwan in the past two years. Personally, I am not a big fan of it, however it was a huge success for McDonald’s Taiwan and helped them to earn a lot of profit from it. According to the news, the headquarters in the States already sent the message to Taiwan branch and ask them to share the recipe with the McDonald’s in pan-asia area. It is very interesting to see that the globalized McDonald’s industry developed its local product, which obviously served as an accommodation to Asian appetites.

]]> I am definitely one of the pickiest Chinese food gastronomes in my age, especially in Shang Hai cuisine. I was born in a big family that praise the importance of each meal and welling to spend time in the whole process of finding materials and cook. My family was immigrants from China in my grandfather’s generation due to the civil war between two political parties in 1949. There were so many immigrants at that time from different province and brought all kinds of cuisine into Taiwan, and make Taiwan, especially Taipei, filled with delicious and various Chinese foods. My family and Taipei spoiled me indeed. The first time I read about chicken with strawberry sauce from a Chinese food restaurant in New York, I almost screamed. Then I realized this is just an accommodation to American appetites like what McD’s did with the burgers.

After reading the articles for this week, I started to think about all the cultural shock experience in the past six months, and found out so that most of them were based on food. Food certainly reflects culture, especially for someone who came from a different cultural background.

Experiential tourism

Last but not the least for the journey this semester. Culinary tourism – experiential tourism. I didn’t realize that all I have been interested in and immersed myself in when travelling is culinary tourism. And I see that was not just because of my love for food in general but that was the only ‘real’ ‘authentic’ tangible experience I was sort of privy to in a foreign land. It comes closest to entering a ‘local’s’ kitchen in their home and sharing a meal – which has always been my fantasy when I travel! I enjoy going grocery shopping in local farmers’ markets when I travel and discovering new greens in particular! And yes, I am all for eco-gastronomy to contribute to the survival of endangered species of foods : ) Particularly when I recently read somewhere that the grains and the vegetables that we eat represent just a small fraction of natural produce that is enriching and equally importantly – experienced.

]]> My memories of travel are always associated with tastes, smells and textures of food – and it does not have to be a ‘gourmet’ over the top bill. Eat where the locals eat – that is always a fun exploration – much more fun that museums for me! I would rather be at home if I had to travel and eat regular plain old food! – such is my determination! I travel to eat!

Reflecting over culinary tourism, the Nagas have somewhat been ‘bashful’ and uncertain about ‘exposing’ the local cuisine to outsiders. The missionaries and the colonizers took everything away but our food! So perhaps that being the only ‘untouched’ ‘unconverted’ ‘un-born-again’ tradition of the Nagas, there was a sense of uncertainty and inhibition as it did not particularly ‘adapt’ with the ways of the new lifestyle and religion. We did not start eating white bread and marmite! When strangers visited from outside Nagaland, Naga food was not proudly served up – instead one would have to go looking for white bread and tumeric and white flour and cooking oil etc…which is not part of our cuisine. However, that said, with the recent advent of tourism in Nagaland things are changing in a big way. Naga cuisine is coming out as it were. The annual Hornbill Festival boasts not just of music, dance, handicrafts, architecture, but cuisine. For the Nagas this is an occasion to celebrate and really enjoy each other’s cuisine (each tribe has its own particular specialty and preparation) and have visitors taste and experience Naga. For the first time, one sees an occassional Naga restaurant in Nagaland. Perhaps, this is an important expression in the struggle to determine our identity. And tourism has been an important bolster it seems.

You are what you eat

Food, like language, is an interesting thing to study because our relationship to it is partly biological and partly cultural. It is hard to distinguish what is natural instinct, and what is a product of socialization. It's even harder to try to eat something you have learned to find disgusting. There is nothing more disgusting than disgusting food.

Most of us, with the exception of those who grow organic gardens and feed themselves, are alienated from the production of the food they eat. Most of us, I assume, are neither subsistence agriculturalists or pastoralists nor hunters and gatherers. Ethnic food once told us who was who. But now, those who live in any major metropolitan area, and even not-so-major ones like Urbana-Champaign, have a myriad of carryout menu-cuisines from which to choose every night of the week. Nevertheless, food marks who we are in many ways.

]]> Do you eat asparagus with your fingers or a utensil? Do you own a set of an ice cream forks? One’s level of cultivation is revealed both through table manners and the ability to consume cosmopolitan delicacies (and, more importantly, the inability to eat base foods). One man’s meat is another man’s poison. Disgust helps distinguish the radically alterior. Remember the monkey brains in Indian Jones?

Slow foods conserve things by making them fashionable and expensive. Eat them to save them. The glaring classism of the movement fact might set off red flags, but in fact everything has an economic substrate. When local peasant economies no longer found these products viable, these specialized products became endangered. As McLuhan has written with respect to media, obsolete media can be preserved by elites as high culture. The same apparently goes fro labor-intensive stinky cheese, tough gamy fowl, and low yield varieties of crops. In fact I think slow food is an ingenious solution. People will pay more to eat well than they will give to charity. If they can simultaneously garner two types of distinction –moral and economic –so much the better.

Delicacies once came from far away. Now everything comes from faraway. Slow food is a new source of culinary distinction. Slow food is difficult to get, make, and know about. It requires education. The nice thing about it is that is a bourgeoisie source of distinction. Anyone with enough money (yes! Even new money) can join in. It does not require dispositions inherited as birthright from certain family backgrounds. Rather the ability to “properly” consume these foods comes through education. It is kind of like a book club.

Slow food chic may keep rare species from extinction, keep artisan producers in business, but it does not keep the original consumers consuming in the bucolic ways they did before industrialization, or whatever happened to make them stop producing their stinky cheese and buy Velveeta slices instead.

It is a strange thing when one group’s food becomes, not just a different group’s luxury, but a source of moral pleasure. I think confused ideals about conserving rare species, demonstrating good taste, and “eating healthy” by ingesting rare, primitive items, comprise the slow food appeal.

I wonder what are the limits? What local cuisines are never going to be slow foods and why? And this question is not limited to Slow food movement foods –also non-brand-named forms of rarified, adventurous, culinary conspicuous consumption. Some foods may always be too “disgusting,” hence marking the outer cultural limits of the movement. (e.g. quinoa - yes; raw free range monkey brains - no). And I think some foods may be without distinction, and can never be considered spiritually “healthy” even if they are the local cuisine and have the same grams of fat (e.g. foie gras – yes, big mac - no). And I think sometimes we just feign disgust to mark our cultural distance from very base popular foods.

one world, one authentic taste

The opening of the first McDonald’s in Budapest was a historical moment. People were standing in the lines long hours to taste their first Big Mac and McChicken, to experience the taste of freedom…

]]> I was also standing there in the line on the first day with my teenager friends. After the first cathartic experience, this is how we spent every Friday evening for a while. I became such a big McDonald’s fan, that wherever I traveled with my family, I insisted that we try the local McDonald’s. If McDonald’s intention was to realize the ideal of “one world, one taste”, their intention failed, in my opinion; despite the same recipe, Big Mac tasted different in every town.

The website of Culinary Tourism Association emphasizes that “culinary art is the only art form that speaks to all five human senses (sight, sound, smell, taste, touch)”. While we are enjoying smelling/tasting the “work of culinary art”, we are also enjoying the sights/sounds of the venue/place. Therefore, our experience of culinary art depends on the setting (the space and the atmosphere) as much as on the actual work of art. I am not sure whether Big Mac should/could be considered as a culinary art work, but it surely felt different in the tiny medieval main square of Freiburg, Germany, under the shadows of the gothic cathedral in Strassburg, France or on the sandy beach of Croatia. Were any of the experiences more authentic than the other? Why is it inappropriate to ask this question in the case of the Big Mac? And why were we obsessed to find the most authentic Frankfurter, Quiche or Pleskaviča in town the next day? What is it that makes culinary art authentic: the dish or the experience?

BKG suggests it is the “authentic experience” that “makes the question of authenticity”, and that it is not the authenticity, but “the question of authenticity” that is “essential to culinary tourism” (1). This question not only “organizes conversation, reflection, and comparison” as BKG points out, but also, as Marx would say, it defines the exchange-value of the experience as a commodity. The more we read and think about authenticity in the context of tourism, the more I believe that ‘authenticity’ is merely an invention of capitalism to legitimize and sell certain products. Without the label of ‘authentic’, many of these products would not sell so well. ‘Authenticity’ in this context is a tool to objectify subjective differences of tastes and senses, to justify the claim that one is more valuable than the other.

But why are we “buying” this? Are we looking for authenticity or are we looking for good food after all? Which one would you choose?

Watch out!! Eco-Gastro Terrorist Coming Through…!!

I have to admit I would probably eat nothing but fast food if it wasn’t unhealthy, meat-laden, bad-tasting, and expensive. Okay, bad example. Then let me say that I would eat nothing but bananas and Powerbars if they didn’t cost so damn much. In other words, on the continuum of Carlo Petrini and Slow Foodists on one hand, and Costco on the other, I happily wheel up my cart and buy in bulk. The gastronomic nuances of organic grapes and Iroquois white corn are lost on me…even if I could be bothered to find them. To use a somewhat trite saying: I eat to live instead of live to eat. While others enjoy savoring home-cooked meals with multiple ingredients, I am happy eating out of the food bins at supermarkets. So where does this place me in relation to Petrini’s crusade?

]]> Well, actually, I am as eco-conscious as the next guy (probably more) and stopped eating meat for over ten years not because of I’m morally opposed to killing animals but because of the politics of food production on our planet. (Living in Jamaica, however, forced me back to poultry due to the fact that they practically eat chicken seven days a week. And I never stopped eating dairy, so I'm somewhat of a hippocrit.) At any rate, I’m responsive to eco-friendly marketing like much of consumers today. And the PETA-type people *are* starting to get to me. For example, I was paying double for “cage-free” eggs, thinking that I was buying the products of a small band of chickens happily living their lives on some family farm, leisurely strutting about and eating worms and seeds as God intended. Unfortunately, I took the time recently to investigate what this “cage-free” and “free-range” business is all about. (“Free-range” seemed much more promising that “cage-free” so I wanted to see if there was a differnce.) Well, in the end, all of the information I could find stated that there isn’t any difference at all. Nor does it mean such eggs come from little Mom-and-Pop farms with just a handful of birds. “Cage-free” can mean living in a huge factory room with multitudes of other chickens as long as there is a minimum of 1 square foot per bird. In other words, a ten by ten foot room can have a hundred chickens in it. That’s a lot of birds. “Free-range” means that at the end of this indoor building there must be a little tiny opening where a chicken (if she happens to find it) is able to go outside into a caged off area. Needless to say, I was less than happy to find out about this. Does this mean I might as well buy the cheap eggs, or do I have to give up a quick form of protein? God forbid I actually look at how dairy cows are treated. I’d starve without ice-cream and cheese.

All of this is to say that Slow Food’s strategy of connoisseurship seems to me to be the restaurant side of a general speciality trend towards “organic” and “humane” food production. These options ultimately need to be economically competitive in the market-place. After all, as Pollan says, restaurants still want their 18 lbs turkeys. And no one wants to pay 8 dollars for a dozen eggs. Is Slow Food really that radical, or just a niche market that responds to market forces like everything else?

Authenticity Again Rears Its Ugly Head

Ah…authenticity…I was starting to miss you. Or was it only last week that you were in our discussion? Nevermind. When it comes to culinary tourism, authenticity really hits home for me. This is all the more striking for me considering I don’t care that much about food. (Ask me what I had at almost any restaurant I’ve been to in the past…I won’t be able to tell you.) But if I’m traveling abroad, I want to stay away from the “tourist” restaurants…even though they probably have the food that I will most recognize and enjoy. Also, if I happen to be in a restaurant at home, I immediately tend to gravitate towards the weirdest thing on the menu. Not because I think it will taste better, but because, hell, if I’m going to actually go to a restaurant, I might as well experience something new. This relates directly to what BKG mentions regarding the “question of authenticity.” I order stuff not because I hope that it will be a culinary delight, but because I want something new and exciting. (Preferably some strange sea creature…) If I have never seen it before, it is “authentic” to me and thus more valuable.

Well, I’m going to wrap this up now. I’m really hungry and it’s time to heat up that frozen pizza. Now then, how does this oven-thing work again?...