Crossing to Another Side of the Foodway

This article blew my mind. It was like everything I have ever unsuccessfully tried to say about food verbalized in perfect eloquence. I love the anthropological approach in the exploration of food in anthropological tourism. This perspective shed new light on both food and tourism for me, and how each are often victimized by social constructions.

            Additionally, learning about the concept of a “foodway” was particularly insightful. These sections labeled aspects of food that we talk about each day and identified them as one unified, concrete concept: “the network of behaviors, traditions, and beliefs concerning food… and the activities surrounding a food item and its consumption, including the procurement, preservation, preparation, presentation, and performance of that food” (8). It is this idea that makes eating an experience, and a lens through which a person can see and the diversity of ways that a person can interact with culture and food. The concept of “otherness” also framed so many aspects of familiar elements of food and food systems to mean something so much broader and more telling about society and culture.

For example, “otherness” of region is something that I can completely identify with coming away from my days of feeling like a new foodie in Michigan. Not only do certain food items and the cultures they cultivate characterize certain areas and the people that live there, but they are also a part of our unified identification as a greater nation with individual histories. Michigan is certainly a microcosm for this concept with Cherries in Travcrse City, asparagus in Oceana County, and those hot pastry cakes that I can’t remember the name of in the UP. These foods shape the natural environment of each of these areas, and thus the culture and society surrounding and interacting with these foods. Similarly, I identified with the shift in perspective that comes when “an individual physically changes location and finds his or herself loving within a new foodways system” (35). This statement applies to shifting from urban to rural experiences, changes between cities with more prominent ethnicities, regions of the country, neighborhood access, and many other complex geographical and personality elements of food and place.

Finally, reading about Thai food experiences in the United Stated caused me to think about my own patronage of Thai restaurants, and the reasons behind my yearning for the authenticity or flavor of the food, or combination of each. In a way, becoming literate about the idea of authenticity has ruined that illusion for me, and infiltrated the way I will always think about foreign food experiences in a local culture. I was struck by one of the observations made from the study that “encounter with the other is needed to bring the tourist’s own cultural identity into better focus” (66). Initially, I perceived this statement to completely deface the idea of cross-cultural interaction through food. However, it is the yearning for an “exotic” and “authentic experience” that lends distance, and therefore differentiation to these experiences, which is especially believable and even relatable in the context of experiencing food of another culture in American restaurants.