Adventuring and Belonging

Abstract

This article focuses on a particular genre of travel writing—the “villa book”—and, within its narratives, a particular site of spatial and cultural resonances—the food market. Through intimations of edible escapes to “other” places, “villa books” trace complex connections of people, food, migration, and tourism in sensual landscapes of 21st-century Western cultural imaginaries. Primarily, the article examines some of those comforting assumptions of what “one does” as a gourmet traveler and “worries” at their textual inscriptions, mapping contradictory moments in the writing of Frances Mayes (Under the Tuscan Sun) and Tony Cohan (On Mexico Time). The final destination of these guided tours of the marketplace is some speculations on the politics of culinary adventuring and belonging in a globalized world, inscribed with cultures of cosmopolitan consumption.