The Other Food

Food is an important part of tourism, not just out of physiological needs, but also as an experience of destination culture. To the extent that food represents local culture and place identity, various forms of touristic engagement with food can be understood as discourses of intercultural communication (Long, 2013, Culinary tourism: A folkloristic perspective on eating and otherness. In Long, L. (ed.), Culinary Tourism (pp. 20–50). Lexington: University Press of Kentucky; Walter, 2017 , Culinary tourism as living history: Staging tourist performance and perceptions of authenticity in a Thai cooking school. Journal of Heritage Tourism , 12, 365–379). This chapter looks at one type of culinary tourism, tourist cooking classes, where tourists explore and participate in the foodways of the Other through shopping, cooking, eating as well as talking about food. Based on examination of online reviews of two cooking schools in Yangshuo, China, three themes are identified in the touristic representation of Chinese food and foodways: the unsightly and smelly Other; the English-speaking Other; the in(authentic) Other. It is suggested that these discourses show the ambivalent and binary nature of Other representation wherein Chinese food and foodways are both desirable and despicable. Yet, these representations are ideologically consistent in their reproduction of tourist privilege and cultural superiority.