This would likely be the well-educated, discerning sort of person, likely but not exclusively into Third Age, and who will take their tourism experience slowly and deeply and not in a milieu of frenzy and effervescence.This is manifestly one type and probably the main one. However, another and different sector whose focus can be gourmet food and lots of drink, is the ‘party animal’, extrovert type, or else someone wanting to exchange a measured daily life for an exuberant existence of over-indulgence while on holiday. Rojek describes ‘Wild leisure patterns’ which people in the developed world can adopt for contrast to ‘the modern social order’, and in crowds, but remarking also that ‘To some extent a margin for wildness is still built into the modern social order’ and provides group celebrations as examples.
The concern of the exuberant will be less for speciality foods with their rural emanation strongly manifest, as for bars, pubs and nightclubs, and up-scale restaurants of lively cities and resorts. In the area between these groups is the design enthusiast and upscale lifestyle adherent whose chosen holiday destination is the coolly-designed hotel with designer food to match. Depicting these groups displays that characteristics evident or present in the consumer in everyday life ‘show through’ in their choice of type and experience of food and drink holiday. The time away from home brings the opportunity for heightening and developing interests and tendencies, and exploring concerns, already in presence at home, and albeit and precisely because they cannot be, or are not chosen to be, pursued as part of everyday life and during what is being done routinely.
A pre-eminent motivation to food and drink tourism, and attached to a certain and central type of food and drink tourist, is to seek knowledge and reconnection with land and agriculture by finding and consuming traditional, artisan, individualized and produced at small-scale, food and drink. The character of action here is making the investigation as a recreational experience on holiday or day visit. The questions are: why is these being done and how? O’Hagan delivers some causes in society, which it would be reasonable to assume find reflection in tourists. He believes that ‘in the world at large, GM crops are corrupting the relation of people to the land they live in’. So, again fear is suggested as the society impulse, and in this instance not only fear about food safety but fear of loss of connection to the traditional process of food production and which is based in land and different seasons.
The growing to a sizeable minority of the market for organic food and drink is doubtless rooted in fear of other types and much as positive enthusiasm for organic food and drink in themselves and for their style of production and presence. A recognition and attempt to rectify it – by both general consumer and provider – of the ‘a town-country schism’ Harvey depicts as present in the UK. The split has delivered ‘parallel cultures in one small, crowded island’, and the cause he describes as being ‘Enclosures and two centuries of industrialisation’. Nettleton reports a survey of Country Life magazine showing ‘a disturbing lack of knowledge of nature and the countryside among the nation’s schoolchildren’. O’Hagan visits a large London supermarket of Sainsbury’s and is told that ‘Real food’ is what the consumer wants.
Travel which views food is itself encouraging a greater speciality food interest, as O’Hagan was advised in this remark of a Sainbury’s food technologist ‘People go to Tuscany … and they eat Parma ham and they come back here and they want it all the time’. The presence of the magazine entitled Food and Travel is revealing evidence of a food and drink tourism sector of interest, as is the burgeoning number of country guides of the Lonely Planet World Food series.
Food Tourism: Travelling to Obtain Food
