Gastronomy Tourism - A Tool for Promoting Jharkhand as a Tourist Destination

Abstract

Gastronomy has been an important attribute in development of niche travel & niche destination. Literature supports that there is a relationship between tourism & gastronomy yet the use of gastronomy as a tourism product has been concise to presentation & offering of local cuisines to tourists. Gastronomy tourism can be pull factor for many tourism market segments. Due to diverse geographical conditions in India not all states can avail the pre-tested 4S formula (sun, sand sea & sex) to promote tourism. Gastronomy tourism however can be unique tool to tourism development. The study was undertaken in Jharkhand which is the 286 State of Indian Union offering tribal gastronomy which can be a pull factor for not merely special interest tourists but also urban & International tourist population. Though Jharkhand was carved out of Bihar on 15th Nov 2000 however the region's rich history & culture goes thousand of years beyond its present stature. The various regional delicacies are influenced by culinary trend from neighbouring states e.g. Bihar, West Bengal, Orissa & Chhattisgarh still many of the local food & beverages are prepared in their own way which can be both a relishing as well as learning experience for gastronomy tourists

Food tourism research in India – current trends and future scope

“…These studies broadly discuss the concept of food tourism and then focus on the multiple roles of food tourism in specific regions of the country. Stakeholders and destination marketing organizations identified food tourism as positively contributing to tourism promotion (Banerjee, 2013; Chand et al , 2007) and sustainable development (Panicker and Priya, 2021). Enhancing the image by branding destinations, this new form plays a crucial role in promoting and marketing destinations in India (Mohapatra, 2017).…”

“…Hence, the number of studies in India has been limited compared to those outside India. Food tourism research in India has been carried out under various themes, emerging role of food tourism (Chand et al , 2007; Sabari Shankar, 2022), foreign tourists’ culinary preferences (Updhyay and Sharma, 2014), using food tourism to market destinations (Abraham and Kannan, 2015; Kumar and Singh Rana, 2016; Mehul Krishna Kumar, 2019; Pal, 2020; Rana et al , 2018; Sahoo, 2020), importance of food tourism (Mohanty et al , 2020; Mohapatra, 2017), street foods and tourists experiences (Gupta et al , 2019a; Gupta et al , 2019b; Gupta and Sajnani, 2019; Khanna et al , 2022), sustainability using street foods (Panicker and Priya, 2021), food image and local cuisine (Chatterjee and Suklabaidya, 2021; Gupta et al , 2020), food culture and tourism (Mekoth and Thomson, 2018; Mohanty et al , 2020), slow food and tourism development (Ahlawat et al , 2019), food neophobia and food event revisit intentions (Payini et al , 2020), food tour experiences of tourists (Kaushal and Yadav, 2020), local food consumption experiences of tourists (Mawroh and Dixit, 2023; Piramanayagam et al , 2020), satisfaction and loyalty among local food festival visitors (Zargar and Farmanesh, 2021), measuring gastro-nostalgia among food festival visitors (Mandal et al , 2022) and development of a foodie scale (Setia et al , 2022).…”