Food Tourism and the Future

Vacation season is officially upon us and many are considering where to travel to during these overheated summer months. When you’re deciding on a destination, you may consider numerous things, including weather, location, and price. One aspect that’s become more critical to travelers, according to tourism professional Ali Al-Naama, is food and the concept of food tourism. But what impact is this new branch of the tourism industry having on the economy—and the environment?

FOOD TOURISM AND THE FUTURE

Although food tourism may sound simply like the action of tourists eating while traveling, it is a lot more. It reaches into a huge positive effect on our natural resource supply and the tourism industry as a whole. Food tourism is quite directly the exploration of food as the purpose of travel. Food already ranks with climate, accommodation, and environment as being important to travelers. Food tourists are often drawn to the locally grown produce of a destination, which they see as deeply connecting them to its origins. Each location becomes unique because of its offerings.

These things are appealing to the tourists who want to be part of the local community. Travelers today seek travel experiences based on indigenous lifestyle and identity. These things typically revolve highly around food. A newer form of tourism, it is spreading widely across the globe, as the food industry continues to explode through more restaurants. This also is expounded as a growing industry of chefs and other careers.

The Future of Food Tourism

Due to the changes in the convenience of organic food and the abnormal trafficking of food across continents, food tourism is being led along a different path. The pursuit of local food to its source is fighting against what another part of the food movement is trying to do. To prepare the perfect plate or unique menu, chefs and restaurateurs are importing raw ingredients. Ingredients that must travel hundreds and thousands of miles of land, air, or water across continents for the mere purpose of a single dish.

With these unique products available with ease, food markets and grocery stores are partaking in this retrieval of food unique to distant locations to please their consumers. This transport of food across the globe is leaving a dense carbon footprint. This results in using up vital, limited natural resources. This threatens the idea of food tourism and drains natural resources required for growing food.

Food Waste

Those in the gourmet food business determined to create the perfect menu or meal are not only importing native food from far-off destinations, but are wasting perfectly edible portions of produce, meat, and fish for presentation purposes. This is a widespread habit of those who are not directly affected by hunger. There are people who encounter these chefs and businesses and go the extra mile. They are using locally available food and repurposing every part of their food for consumption. The question is which foodie class weighs heavier: the one depleting the pure food of the future at an accelerated rate for momentary pleasures or the group that understands sustainability and its important future. The tourism industry must take both into consideration for the future because they each leave their own mark on the environment.

Either way, food tourism is evolving and is expected to continue changing in the future. There are various possibilities for how it will end up. It all depends on the popularity of people living sustainable lifestyles versus leading to a faster depletion of natural assets. If the scale tips towards the part of humanity that is environmentally aware, then the future of travel will lean toward one future. If the depletion of natural resources happens faster than anticipated, however, a complete collapse is most likely.

Science and Tourism

Besides man, science will be a key determinant of the future of food tourism. There is the probability that food tourism will continue to seek out food grown naturally at every destination. The parallel future may be an inflated form of today’s obsession with master chefs’ artificially created cuisines. Scientists have been creating synthetic food for mankind in preparation as a solution for possible future food shortages. Unlike genetically modified organisms (GMO) that splice in traits from other species to make the food we see on the shelves of markets today, synthetic biology involves the creation of new organisms in a lab with their own full DNA. The technology to achieve this is closely guarded to prevent an adverse reaction from the public. In order for the planet, and food tourism, to flourish in the future, all possible outcomes need to be explored and prepared.

If synthetic food is the future, food tourism may focus more on the technology employed to create these foods and the unique outcomes it might explore. Some may scour the planet still in search of raw food as it becomes a rare and much-desired delicacy. In fact, the pursuit of organic, unprocessed food for tourism purposes may become reserved for the wealthy class and unattainable to the rest of the world. Just because synthetic food is undesirable to the world today, the burden of the predicting the future of how to feed the world in the face of depleted resources has been taken up responsibly by scientists through extensive, and reliable, scenario planning.

What do you think about the findings we shared from Ali Al-Naama? You can read more about this and other topics in his book, I’m Such a Tourist, available now.

If you are looking for the best and latest in Arizona restaurant and culinary news, please make sure to sign up for our newsletter, give us a like on Facebook, follow us on Twitter and Instagram to make sure that you never miss a bite!

© Taryn Jeffries 2016