Negotiating place through food and drink: Experiencing home and away

Abstract

This study examines how food and drink-related practices mediate tourists' experiences in destinations. Adopting an interpretivist approach, and drawing on content analysis of travel blogs, the paper contributes to knowledge by demonstrating how the production and consumption of food and drink are used to negotiate feelings, memories and encounters in places. More specifically, we distinguish between three areas of practice: firstly, how situational control is established and articulated through familiarity with foods, but may also be challenged by exposure to disruptive consumption activities. Secondly, how sociability is performed and experienced, including through practices of 'Othering' that emerge through food and drink-centred encounters. Finally, how tourists construct new notions of home through eating and drinking routines. We argue that focusing on these areas helps to understand the intersections of food and drinkrelated practice and tourist experiences in and of place(s).

Exploring the hospitality-tourism nexus: Directions and questions for past and future research

“…Examining hospitality-related socio-material practices is often important for making sense of tourist experiences, for example, as people encounter servicescapes, or as eating and drinking shape visitors’ engagement with destinations and its inhabitants (cf. Bezzola and Lugosi, 2018; Mkono, 2011; Osman et al, 2014). Arguably, the material-technological dimensions of hospitality have the potential to transform perceptions of welcome or hostility for visitors, insofar as they reinforce a sense of foreignness and outsider status, familiarity or accommodation.…”

Social innovations and sustainability of tourism: Insights from public sector in Kemi, Finland

“…For instance, waste food could be gathered from restaurants and hotels and a collaborative cooking club for tourists or, perhaps, for tourists and locals could be arranged. By that means, the visitors could get local food experiences (see Bell, 2015), which also enhances their sense of the visited place (Bezzola and Lugosi, 2018). At the same time, they could learn about sustainability, and tourism could be better connected to locals’ lives.…”

Trajectories of embodiment inTourist Studies

“…Taste is a sensescape that has also received specific attention in Tourist Studies , with many articles focussing on the role of food and drink play in articulating the tourist experience. For example, Bezzola and Lugosi (2018) look at how tourists negotiate a sense of home and away through the consumption of food and drink, while Everett (2009) uses food to draw a more heterogenous sensory landscape where tourists are immersed in waves of taste, smell, sound and touch. Andrews (2005) explores the embodied nature of smell and hearing and constructions of national and gendered identities in tourism practices.…”