How to Frame Destination Foodscapes? A Perspective of Mixed Food Experience.

Abstract

Foodscape conceptualizes the dynamic human–food–place nexus. Tourism provides a cross-cultural context where tourists can consume different destination foods and places, during which multiple types of destination foodscapes are produced. However, few studies explore how to frame the types and connotations of destination foodscape. Tourists’ travelogues provide a rich database to examine this question. Through netnography, this study collects and analyzes 86 posts of travelogues published from 2012 to 2019 in Mafengwo, a famous Chinese online travel community, about Chinese tourists’ food experiences in Chiang Mai, Thailand. We summarize five types of destination foodscapes, globalized recreational foodscape, staged local foodscape, glocalized foodscape, authentic local foodscape, and overseas ethnic foodscape in which tourists obtain different familiar-novelty hybrid experiences. This study contributes to interdisciplinary dialogue between food and tourism literature by proposing a coordinate framework with two axes, the spectrum of cultural distance and the spectrum of serving tourists/locals, to classify destination foodscape and a six-dimensional network construct to reveal the connotations of destination foodscape. Relevant strategies for promoting destination food and tourism development are also provided.