Magic Mussels: Ingredients for Improvising a Tourism Destination

Abstract

The article follows the foodways of mussels and explores the complex human and nonhuman entanglement their travels combine in order to uncover how a destination is improvised. Since 2010 the Museum of Sorcery of Witchcraft in North West Iceland, in a region named Strandir, has reduced its menu to serve platters of mussels during the summer as the only main course. Hence, it is examined how mussels as ingredients have added their flavor to Strandir and continue to enact it in a special way as a destination. This is a process in which I claim that mussels as a food are localized not in the sense that they are immobilized but rather through how they continue to move and enact Strandir as a destination in different contexts.