Food Tourism and the Consumer Needs

The motivation helps make food and drink as desirable objects to give especial attention to in tourism. Of course, tourism is not an automatic area for providing food and drink of excellence, but when on holiday – ‘the paradise time’ – consumers do perhaps have an inbuilt high expectation of good produce and have time to give attention to obtaining it. Simply because they are on non-home territory and confronted with non-routine food and drink, their concerns about food safety are likely to be heightened, and extending beyond the standard worry about whether local water is safe to drink or not. MacLaurin reporting food safety in travel and tourism conference in the year 2000 describes its conclusion that ‘Food safety is an important component of the overall travel safety and security package’.

Time and its type and use is key in food and drink tourism. Fast food we connect of course to the consumer not having much time for the comestible. It is an ‘on the go’ matter. This type allows, demands, in the interests of the busy consumer and the maximum-profit-aiming provider, to have a streamlined character of not much choice or too much variety of type being offered. The defects seen by some are defined by Schlosser. Explaining resistance moves against fast food, such as those of Frenchman José Bové, Schlosser says ‘Fast food has become a target because it is so ubiquitous and because it threatens a fundamental aspect of national identity: how, where, and what people choose to eat’.

Rojek sees the time within leisure as being fast or slow and with fast being very mobile and offering a superficial engagement as with a game on a computer as contrasted with novel-reading a novel which is slow. It can be assumed therefore that tourism having food and drink as direct and deep foci of tourist attention is a slow type of tourism endeavour. However, Rojek warns in association, and discussing the relevance of ‘flow’ that ‘serious leisure does not always involve engrossing, self-actualizing experience, just as casual leisure is not always meaningless and desultory’. He continues, ‘The concept of flow conveys more faithfully the anti-climactic gap between aspiration and achievement that is a common feature of leisure experience. It is also better able to handle variations in intensity and tempo of experience that occur in leisure’.

Time is of important relevance to food and drink tourism and where this is most directly connecting with the agricultural round and its processes. Urry talks of ‘glacial time [which] is slow-moving’ in the present. He says ‘Glacial time can be seen in various forms of resistance to the “placelessness” of instantaneous time’, continuing to say that ‘The organisation Common Ground seeks to remake places as sites for “strolling” and “living in”, and not just for passing through “instantaneously”’. Of particular relevance to the subject of this book is that through its Apple Week promotion and general initiative in relation to orchards, Common Ground has arrived in position of leader and encourager of apple tourism in the UK.

Food Tourism, Growing Hunger Crisis and Capitalist Ambitions