A Culinary Tourism Bibliography 📚

Everything we read in class, as well as what we didn’t.

This is an extended bibliography for my Culinary Tourism class at Boston University’s masters of gastronomy program. Here are the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh lectures, plus our itinerary from a week traveling around Puerto Rico. We’ve come to the end of our informal newsletter semester!

When I was first approached to teach culinary tourism, I began by researching what is meant by that topic beyond the vague connotations in my head. This led me, of course, to the book Culinary Tourism, the 1998 text edited by Lucy M. Long. I went back to Lisa Heldke’s Exotic Appetites: Ruminations of a Food Adventurer. I started to dig into how cuisine is used in nation-branding campaigns and as a form of soft power. I wrote a syllabus that would’ve had me giving eleven lectures (rather than seven) on top of the week-long trip to Puerto Rico, where I acted as a guide (but more like a curator of experience, if you’ll allow me a gross phrase). 

Luckily, I was told that would be too much, so we cut it back. That left a lot of reading and ideas on the table that ended up being cut, to the point that it was funny to me when a couple of students asked for an extended reading list. And so here is a bigger bibliography for culinary tourism, if you’d like to dig in. For the smaller articles we read, they’re all noted and linked in the lectures.

I’ve found that I really enjoy doing this sort of thing (and writing syllabuses and lectures), and so I’ll be writing a future essay on my research process for an essay—then the essay itself will come out the next week. Basically, we’re staying in nerd mode for a bit until I fully exit the teaching brain space in May. Am I ever out of nerd mode, though? Don’t answer that.

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An announcement: Friday’s From the Kitchen dispatch for paid subscribers will be replaced on the first Friday of every month (starting this Friday) by From the Desk Recommends, a list of the articles, podcasts, newsletters, social media posts, academic articles, TV shows, movies, songs, and all cultural ephemera that I’ve enjoyed over the past few weeks. I’m excited to have an archive of this kind of stuff to refer back to!

From the Kitchen will resume for the remaining Fridays of each month, with kitchen notes, recipes, and cookbook thoughts. I’m excited to offer something to would-be subscribers who might not be into cooking but are into cool things.

Paid subscribers will also be first in line for some cool book-related things that will be revealed in the lead-up to the release of No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating on August 15!

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Without further adieu, the extended bibliography of my culinary tourism research…

The Foundational
Culinary Tourism, edited by Lucy M. Long
Exotic Appetites: Ruminations of a Food Adventurer by Lisa Heldke
The Tourist Gaze by John Urry
Tourism and Development in the Third World by John Lea
Culinary Capital by Peter Naccarato and Kathleen Lebesco
Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Foodscape by Josee Johnston and Shyon Baumann

The Specific
Eating Puerto Rico: A History of Food, Culture, and Identity by Cruz M. Ortiz Cuadra
Food in Cuba: In Pursuit of a Decent Meal by Hanna Garth
London Feeds Itself, edited by Jonathan Nunn

On Colonialism
A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid
Resisting Paradise: Tourism, Diaspora, and Sexuality in Caribbean Culture by Angelique V. Nixon
Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment by Hi'ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart

What Is “American” Food?
The Taste of America by John L. and Karen Hess
Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Changed American Cuisine by Mayukh Sen

The Role of the Restaurant
The Ethnic Restaurateur by Krishendu Ray
Gastronativism: Food, Identity, Politics by Fabio Parasecoli
Global Brooklyn: Designing Food Experiences in World Cities by Fabio Parasecoli and Mateusz Halawa

As noted above, this Friday is the debut of From the Desk Recommends, a monthly paid subscriber supplement of links to all the cultural ephemera I’ve been into for the past few weeks.

Published
For FoodPrint—who rule—I wrote about Tamar Adler’s new cookbook, The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A–Z. I loved it, because I prefer a cookbook that talks to you where you are rather than tells you what you should be doing.

Reading
Speaking of bibliographies! I’m in research mode for a presentation at a recipe conference later this month. This has included the slim Recipe by Lynn Z. Bloom. I’ll probably publish the presentation here with its own bibliography.

Cooking
We had an Ooni pizza night last week—getting better! I made a vodka sauce because I’m really into vodka sauce because of the vodka slice at Lucia Pizza of Avenue X.