Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, food was considered by the UNTWO to be one of the top three motivators for travel. Such food-centric tourism brought in huge amounts of money to host communities, tourism providers, and hospitality services. According to the World Travel and Tourism Council, 2020 saw the loss of more than $2.1 trillion in revenues and the closure of hundreds of thousands of related businesses with devastating impacts on personal livelihoods.

Many culinary tourists, meanwhile, turned to virtual experiences to satisfy their curiosity about new foods and tastes, and numerous culinary tourism providers refocused their energies on creating and delivering such experiences. Using formal media outlets as well as informal social media, the months during the pandemic saw an explosion of virtual culinary tours, travel shows, online cooking classes, cookbooks, food memoires, and blogs and home videos about food. Tangible, “real-life” experiences could be found through meal delivery services as well as carry-outs developed by restaurants and home cooks.

These virtual formats actually seem to be reaching a larger number of audiences than the pre-COVID culinary tourism industry, and they are including a larger variety of destinations and food cultures than previously available for in-person visiting. They actually seem to be “whetting the appetite” for future travel with highly optimistic forecasts from the industry for increased growth. They also, I feel, can make culinary tourism more interpretive and more reflective, encouraging tourists to seek experiences that are more sustainable for all parties involved.

Borrowing from the National Association for Interpretation, I use “interpretive” here not to refer to language translation, but to interactive processes of communication between providers, hosts, and tourists that create deeper understandings of a destination or attraction. Interpretation goes beyond education, although it does teach about a food culture and its specific manifestations. It also finds the ways in which that food is relevant to a particular tourist; then forges an emotional connection between the tourist and the resources. That connection then leads to a sense of responsibility and concern for the well-being of the people involved in producing and serving that food. While this outcome may seem overly optimistic, those involved in producing culinary tourism experiences can shape these experiences to be interpretive. Also, such interpretation seems to be happening organically through some virtual formats in which individuals tell their own stories and offer their own food histories, skills, and content.

The pandemic has also created the potential of a more reflective culinary tourism. The virtual projects actually challenge the more industry-driven conception of tourism as physical travel to a destination. These activities represent a more philosophical approach to tourism itself as a state of seeing or attitude. Drawing from John Urry’s notion of the tourist gaze, I have suggested defining culinary tourism as “the intentional, voluntary participation in the foodways of an Other” (1998, 2004). Such “eating out of curiosity” is based on a negotiation for each individual between what they consider exotic and what they consider familiar—a food or foodways activity needs to be new and strange enough to pull (whether corporeally or virtually) a tourist from home, but it also needs to be familiar and safe enough so that they want to face the new. Personal identities and histories shift the line between exotic and familiar, making an exotic food familiar and vice versa on an individual basis.

From this perspective, it is possible that emerging virtual formats are making tourists more knowledgeable about other food cultures and more aware of their meanings and histories. They can also make tourists more reflective of their own food cultures, shifting their gaze onto familiar foods to see them through the eyes of others as exotic. Such a shift can then cause them to question their assumptions about the edibility or palatability of certain ingredients, the appropriateness of dishes or eating styles in different contexts, and the ways in which food expresses the self and binds us to our pasts and our communities. While some guidance or nudging may be needed, culinary tourists may then be better able to see commonalities between themselves and others, recognizing the complexity as well as the humanity of those inhabiting other food cultures.

While I do not want to downplay the difficulties and tragedies caused by the pandemic, I think it offers us the opportunity to reset our approaches to both food and tourism so that we can develop a more interpretative and reflective culinary tourism that, I believe, will benefit us all.