Long

Culinary tourism is about food as a subject and medium, destination and vehicle, for tourism.

Culinary tourism as the intentional, exploratory participation in the foodways of participation including the consumption, preparation, and presentation of a food item, cuisine, mael system, or eating style considered to belong to a culinary system not one’s. The idea of tourism being voluntary is a key concept in these definitions. We must think of a food as being somehow different, new or exotic in order to think of exploring it. We otherwise would have considered inedible or unappealing and would have approached with curiosity, with the sense of trying something different. Otherness is a construction by the individual as well as by the culture within which that individual moves. The other can be distinguished from the familiar along a variety of dimensions. Ethos and religion also defined the other. Ethos may also be formally organized but less associated with the spiritual world. Region exists within cultures and often offers a localization of a broadly cultural foodways as well as a foodways of eras other than the present. Time as other can refer to futuristic foods and include special foodways set aside for holiday celebrations or rituals. Socioeconomic class as culinary other divides foodways according to recognized social levels within a society. Gender and age tow more categories of otherness. In the context of foodways, the crux of otherness involves three realms of experience; it is exotic, the edible, and the palatable.

	Exotic
Edible palatable	+	inedible unpalatable
	Familiar

There have five basic strategies for negotiating; they are framing, naming or translation, explication, menu selection, and recipe adaptation. Some of the strategies used in negotiating the realm of exoticness and the edibility confirm the need to locate culinary tourism in the perspectives of the individuals involved.

Food offers us an aesthetic experience, and like other aesthetic realms (music, dance, art), it draws own universe of meaning. Food expands our understanding of both food and tourism.