Material matters: understanding ‘local food’ through a material-semiotic approach

Abstract

‘Local food’ plays a critical role in tourism destinations by attracting tourists and enhancing their experiences, thus indicating the need for researchers to examine how destinations can establish local food. Research has focused on the social and cultural construction of local food, but there have been limited inquiries into how the materiality of food is intertwined with human practices in the process. This perspective has hindered new insights into the becoming of local food in tourism destinations. This study conceptualises local food as an effect of an actor-network and investigates the dynamic and relational process of the becoming of local food in a tourism destination. In particular, this research selected Chaozhou beef food as a case and collected data through 49 on-site semi-structured interviews, in-situ observations and secondary data. The results reveal that the becoming of Chaozhou’s local food is due to the entanglement of both human actors, including tourists, artisans in slaughterhouses and staff in restaurants, and non-human actors such as the media, chain restaurants specialising in beef, tourism attractions and the beef itself. Further, the results reveal that the materiality of beef, namely the features of biochemical change and the morphological structure of beef, shapes the slaughterhouses’ and restaurants’ production and the tourists’ consumption of beef. Thus, the agency of material should be considered in the construction and sustainability of local food in tourism destinations.