Lucy M. Long (ed.), Culinary Tourism (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2004). ISBN 0-8131-2292-9. 306 pp.

The concept of "culinary tourism" refers not only to geographical travel for the purpose of sampling foods of foreign lands, but also to any journey outside of one's normal dietary routine into the realm of the exotic "other". This volume is a welcome collection of essays centering on this extension of John Urry's social theory concept of the "tourist gaze".

In editor Lucy Long's introduction and orienting theoretical essay, she distinguishes between different types of otherness and strategies for negotiation, as well as categories more specific to food, such as types of food-related activities and the venues in which they take place. The remaining essays in the volume are case studies. The editor's whip hand is apparently wielded very lightly, hence they are quite diverse in their approaches to their chosen topics and the extent to which they consider theoretical implications of their empirical research. However, their very diversity makes it possible to examine the sheer range of complex possibilities for culinary otherness, something that might be more difficult in a more tightly-structured volume.

While it is of course difficult to make sweeping generalizations, the themes that come across most strongly to this reviewer are those of juxtaposition and hybridity. The book shows how the boundaries between "my cuisine" and "foreign cuisine" are rarely simple or unidimensional. Instead, they may involve geographic, temporal, cultural, and / or socioeconomic dimensions operating simultaneously. Furthermore, the salience of these boundaries can be manipulated via assimilation or alienation, as well as compartmentalization.

For instance, there is more than meets the eye even in something as seemingly simple as geographic tourism. Even within a single society, individuals may become tourists by seeking out and learning to distinguish between regional variations within the society's cuisine. Jeffrey Pilcher describes the rise of "Mexico Profundo", a search for authenticity that leads Mexicans to explore the varied indigenous roots of their regional cuisines, while Kristin McAndrews notes that the majority of tourists of the "poke" (marinated cubed raw fish) festival on the Big Island of Hawai`i are themselves residents of other Hawaiian Islands. However, while recognition of regional differences would intuitively seem to lead to the fragmentation of culinary identity, the opposite is more often true. As Arjun Appadurai has noted elsewhere, the creation of a national cuisine often begins, somewhat paradoxically, with the recognition of the regional differences. It is only through this process that a national cuisine can be organized into an orderly system, and that partial assimilation can begin to occur.

One frequent form of juxtaposition is that between the cultural and temporal. Culinary tourists frequently express dissatisfaction with the global influences present in contemporary ethnic cuisines, and prefer traditional or pseudo-traditional versions that are rarely found today within the societies from which the cuisine originates. Jennie Germann Molz's chapter about Thai restaurants in the West illustrates the way in which the customer's search for the elusive specter of authenticity has caused restaurants to ostentatiously display putative symbols of historical "Thainess" such as Buddhist icons and the royal family, while serving dishes that are deemed ancient in origin, but are in reality adapted to Western tastebuds. Adopting the ideas of Dean MacCannell, she discusses how authenticity, often conflated with tradition, is perceived as an antidote to the rootlessness of modern society.

Likewise, the American baby boomers discussed in the Liz Wilson's chapter have embraced the notion of "healthy Asian" food because it manages to package together multiple forms of exoticism: not only as a cultural alternative to the West, but also as a representative of "ancient" and more environmentally responsible foodways. For Wilson, exploration of "authentic" ethnic food is not merely a form of escapism, but a way for conflicted middle and upper-class Westerners to find a counterweight to their co-optation into (as George Ritzer has coined it) "McDonaldized" society. Hence, the ethnic cuisine is eventually de-exoticized and assimilated into the Western individual's culinary identity, but in one compartment of a dualistic mainstream / counterculture personality that seems to be one of prerequisites for contemporary post-industrial life.

A somewhat different and more poignant example of this kind of juxtaposition is found in Eve Jochnowitz ethnography of Cracow's Szeroka Street, "a Jewish theme park in a country where few Jews survive". Szeroka Street and its array of Jewish restaurants and food shops provide a locale for Poles come to terms, in varying ways, with the nearly-obliterated Jewish past of their society. In some ways, it provides a safe zone where the important influence that Jewish food had on the pre-war urban Polish diet can be experienced as a form of nostalgia, while the eventual decimation of Jewish society and the anti-Semitism that is a part of that history can be put aside for the moment.

Assimilation of cuisines through compartmentalization can lead to culinary identities that are context-specific. The Mormon missionaries in Jill Terry Rudy's chapter seek to reaffirm their American identity while stationed in foreign countries by going to great lengths to procure foods that remind them of home, which are then consumed in an almost ritualistic fashion. However, once they return, however, they make a point of preparing the foods of their host societies for their fellow Americans, thus demonstrating they have nativized themselves to the host culture. It is thus hard to draw a clean line on which types of consumption are "touristic", since what seems mundane at home may be exoticized when abroad.

One case study that illustrates a multitude of assimilative processes is Miryam Rotkovitz's examination of changes over time in the interplay between kosher dietary restrictions and ethnic foods among American Jews. Until the culinary revolutions of the 1970s, kosher foods outside Ashkenazic cuisine were rarely available, hence adventures into treif Chinese restaurant food allowed New York Jews to display their cosmopolitanism while compartmentalizing it within the specific context of restaurant meals. In succeeding years, however, the sheer availability of kosher foods of every ethnicity (including mainstream American food such as the Oreo cookie) has made it unnecessary to violate dietary laws in order experience nearly every element of the ethnic culinary spectrum. Hence, paradoxically, increasing cosmopolitan Jewish culinary identity has coincided with ever-stricter observation of the dietary laws. Yet this very freedom to assimilate ethnic foods has served to weaken the distinct identity associated with American Jewish cuisine, which in turn caused some religious leaders to complain that the laws no longer served their intended social purpose.

Hence the investigation of culinary tourism helps to show how "tourism" is part of a larger process of identity-formation. For individuals in many contemporary societies, it is a never-ending process of seeking out and assimilating the exotic in order to avoid the trap of being caught in the mainstream, then finding that the mainstream has shifted to encompass their new identity. It would be interesting for scholars to investigate what role, if any, this process has had in the major culinary movements of recent decades, including nouvelle cuisine, Slow Food, and the rise of East-West fusion.