Introduction
The aim of this paper is to analyze the practices of sustainable food tourism in Italy. In recent years, food sustainability has found in tourism practice an important channel for promoting and developing itself (Everett and Aitchison, 2008; Sims, 2009). Also, in the past, food tourism was an established practice in Italy, but only in recent years have relations with sustainability been defined more clearly. This alliance between food and sustainability principles has given a different direction to food tourism.
As is well-known, sustainability affects many aspects of life and can be considered, at a macro level, as a different development pattern for society and, at a micro level, as a different way of life for individuals. Sustainability covers many aspects: at an institutional level it orients macroeconomic decisions (energy, agriculture, industry, etc.); at an individual level it is expressed in mobility and food choices and also in the environmental education of children.
An important field for developing a sustainable lifestyle is that of holidays, since they have become an indispensable part of the life of individuals, even in times of economic crisis. Holidays, in fact, are taking on a new role in postmodern society, and they do not mean just a moment of rest from work and escape from one’s own social roles (Feifer, 1985). On the contrary, they often are opportunities to learn, increasing the wealth of every experience, and to exercise, strengthen, and better define our own values (Urry, 1990; Desforges, 2000; McCabe, 2005; Palmer, 1999, 2005). This means that a person who has a sustainable lifestyle rarely undertakes consumerist holidays exerting opposite values. In this sense, holidays have become an important viewpoint to understand sustainability.
We have chosen to present sustainable food tourism in Italy through two important directions of this practice: experiential tourism and authenticity (Prentice et al., 1998; MacCannell, 1973, 1976; Gottlieb, 1982; Pine and Gilmore, 1999; Quan and Wang, 2004). These are two fundamental dimensions to tourism, but they seem to be particularly suited to explaining the specific characteristics of tourism related to sustainable food.
The paper is organized as follows: the first two paragraphs are devoted to authenticity and experiential tourism in sustainable food tourism, trying to show the specificity of the Italian case through some examples. Conclusions will follow in presenting a unique overview of sustainable food tourism trends today.
Authenticity in sustainable food tourism
Consumers, tourists included, are increasingly demanding authentic food (Beer, 2008), and the centrality of authenticity to sustainable food tourism seems obvious. In this section, starting from a perspective of sustainability, we try to elucidate what authenticity could mean in the tourism experience. We also consider some critical points possibly impinging on the implementation of sustainable food tourism in Italy.
Authenticity is one of the oldest and more basic subjects in the sociology of tourism. The theme was raised in tourism studies around the 1970s. At that time, a general devaluation of mass tourism was prevalent, considered as an experience in which individuals could hardly find opportunities of growth because of standardization and artificiality (Boorstin, 1964). MacCannell (1973, 1976), in some sense, reversed this position; he suggested that tourism might be considered as an institution functionally similar to pilgrimage in premodern society, and that modern tourism, and even mass tourism, is pervaded by the search for authenticity. Accordingly, the relations between tourists and local communities should be read in terms of authenticity, distinguishing, in the local community space, between “front regions” where authenticity is scarce and “back regions” characterized by a higher level of authenticity.
The interpretation of tourism as a quest for authenticity proposed by MacCannell has stimulated a wide scientific debate. Over the years, the notion of authenticity has been articulated more precisely, and (at least) three different meanings of the term have emerged. The first, “objective” authenticity, evokes some kind of museum authenticity, the same used by the experts in determining whether an art object belongs to a particular period or another. The second meaning, “constructive”/“symbolic” authenticity, is based on the assumption that even the authentication process of an art object is a social process and, as such, is often socially constructed and reconstructed (Bruner, 1994). Finally, the meaning of “existential” authenticity starts from the observation that every search for authenticity is first of all an individual search, in which several levels of the individual’s participation and commitment are involved (Hughes, 1995; Wang, 1999).
While several authors have considered each of these phenomena an autonomous experience, others (Gilli, 2009) admit a possible confluence: authenticity may result from objective data, from a social confirmation, and, finally, from the experiential dimension of the subject. Anyway, the meaning of authenticity, and the way this notion can be used, continues to be debated in tourism literature. We think that this notion can be very useful in the analysis of certain types of tourism, such as cultural or historical tourism. Since, according to the literature (Richards, 2002; Scarpato, 2002; Beer, 2008; Sims, 2009; Chang et al., 2011), food tourism is but a part of cultural tourism, it seems correct to extend considerations of authenticity to food production and consumption. In this field, authenticity has increasingly acquired a strong economic relevance, and much energy (commercial, political, and intellectual) is spent on defining it: the national and international regulations in the direction of “local food,” protected food, etc., are typical expressions of this interest (Beer, 2008).
Broadly speaking, while authenticity is often evoked as a concrete asset in tourist supply, there has been little attempt by the academic literature to read and analyze concrete tourist situations in terms of authenticity. In fact, it is impossible to apply a unique notion of authenticity to any tourist situation: the authenticity that is desirable for a museum is different from that which should be desirable for an archaeological site, or for a “historical” road, or for a folk festival, or, finally, for a food experience. The notion of authenticity should be reformulated from time to time as the characteristics of the tourism scenario change. In addition, authenticity has not an absolute value, in the sense that it is not an all-or-nothing characteristic. Every tourist situation is a complex situation, and each constituent may be valued as more or less authentic (consider how many steps are covered by “food,” from the crop or from the cowshed to the kitchen). Finally, the same tension existing between commercial stakeholders and local “philologists” about what authenticity should mean (Bruner, 1994), exists also about food authenticity (Beer, 2008). The philological perspective tries to get authenticity all along the line, notwithstanding the fact that some kinds of authenticity do not touch the tourists, or could even hurt them. The commercial perspective is oriented, on the contrary, to satisfying tourists, and the idea of authenticity is often influenced (sometimes, strongly mitigated) by this goal. Sustainable food tourism lives in this complex scenario. In the following pages we try to highlight—with particular reference to Italy—some critical points for the implementation of a sustainable food tourism.
As said above, food experience is not just “eating well,” but is a complex cultural experience, in which all the steps of the production chain before the dinner-table are open, maybe only symbolically or through a narration, to the tourist: above all, the farming and food preparation activities (Richards, 2002; Scarpato, 2002; Beer, 2008; Sims, 2009; Chang et al., 2011). The sustainability of this kind of experience is guaranteed by the fact that at every step some basic conditions are authentic. The characteristics of authenticity that sustainable food tourism should have recall the three well-known dimensions of sustainability: environmental, socio-cultural and economic.
The environmental dimension emphasizes an optimal utilization of physical and natural resources that constitute a key element in tourism development, ensuring the maintenance of essential ecological processes and the conservation of the natural heritage and of biodiversity. This dimension is basic to sustainable food tourism, since the entire food chain depends directly on the presence of the above-mentioned environmental conditions. One should note that the attention paid to these conditions involves a sort of enlargement of the notion of landscape, and one could say that sustainable food tourists are particularly sensitive to the landscape, which is often perceived as an essential ingredient of their experience.
How can authenticity be part of this dimension? In our opinion it is important that biodiversity is really respected and can become an element of the landscape. In this way landscape appears as truly natural, and not as a scene designed for the tourists.
Landscape must be the expression of the rural economy that has molded it, even if the condition of being authentically rural might in part compete with the aesthetic dimension traditionally ascribed to every landscape. This does not mean that the landscape that can be appreciated by food tourists is the landscape as it was in the past: it should show the elements of modernity that the current rural economy entails. In this sense, authenticity in the food tourism scenario is easier to obtain compared to that of a historic site, divided between a hard search for philology and tourists’ need-for-the-past (Bruner, 1994).
This direction of authenticity is not always clear to local communities. Castelrocchero (Piedmont), a small rural village that produces high-quality wine, decided in 2008 to develop local tourism. In many municipal debates previous to the creation of tourism initiatives the farmers were worried about having to hide tractors and agricultural machinery: they used to move around completely freely, and even to wash their tractors at the public fountains. The farmers had difficulty understanding that, in a rural environment, the tourists are not interested in seeing a country cleaned up as new, but a real country, where tractors are visible and, when dirty, they are so because they are used, and are washed in the main square still today as in the past. Similarly, in many places at the foot of the Italian Alps shepherds think that the passage of flocks of sheep and of herds of cows that go up and come down from the mountain pastures may disturb the tourists, while the opposite is true: the passage of sheep or cows is a guarantee, to the eyes of sustainable food tourists, that the meat and the cheese they eat are genuine, because they are local: and to be local is a via regia to authenticity (being local means also the openness to be looked over). One might add that, besides evidencing that the food is produced by a local economy, these passages of animals offer a view scarcely equaled in the everyday life of the Alpine community, and no “historical” re-enactment could match their beauty.
The socio-cultural dimension involves the respect of the socio-cultural identity of the host community, where “culture” means material, immaterial, and symbolic culture. In sustainable food tourism, this respect is crucial, since the entire culinary experience depends closely on the presence of these cultural traditions.
Here, how could authenticity be achieved? It seems important (to say it with a slogan) that the culinary “back region” and the culinary “front region” coincide, that is, that the food offered to the tourists is the same as that consumed by the locals in everyday life. This raises a problem that emerges in any form of ethnic tourism. Tourists are accustomed to the tastes offered by ethnic restaurants transplanted to the West, where food always has a “simplified register” (Ferguson, 1981) and extreme tastes are frequently mitigated. When they go abroad and eat local cuisine, they are unprepared for strong flavors (Cohen and Avieli, 2004). Even in Italy the recipes may sometimes be simplified or modified to match the tourists’ taste more closely. A typical example is a traditional Piedmont recipe, “bagna caôda,” consisting of cream, anchovies, and garlic. In some cases the true flavor of the recipe is renounced: the garlic is not used because it seems that some tourists don’t like it.
The same thing happens to milk and butter, whose taste and nourishing content have been strongly mitigated by the food industry: hence the disappointment of some tourists before the wealth of the farm milk and of its derivatives. Another example of this difficulty in developing sustainable food is river fish. In a recent survey on the communities living on the banks of the river Po in northern Italy, it was found (Gilli, 2010, 2011) that, while some tourist development projects were focused on a re-proposal of the local cuisine (where river fish is one of the chief elements), many in-depth interviews with stakeholders indicated that the river fish flavor is not always appreciated by the people (especially children), who are used to lighter tastes. One could conclude that many people, especially those who live in urban settings and have few (if any) experiences of rural food, have an “anesthetized” palate, used to sweetened flavors and insensitive (or even worse) to strong flavors. In particular, the young generations have no taste or olfactory rural “memory” (here, one could mention the taste education of children carried out by the Slow Food movement, a movement for the protection and development of local food, born in Italy but now widespread in many parts of the world). Anyway, although no sustainable food project would neglect the actual taste of the tourist, one should always make room for a sort of re-education of the tourists toward an appreciation of strong and authentic flavors.
The economic dimension of sustainability consists in stimulating economic initiatives whose socio-economic benefits may be equitably distributed among all the stakeholders. The goal of a local development can hardly be pursued with the traditional instruments of government that follow the institutional political ways: much more useful would be a perspective of governance characterized by a bottom-up configuration, which enhances the role of local communities and a diffuse public–private partnership on a local basis. This kind of governance, in opposition to the hierarchical control model, is characterized by a greater degree of cooperation between local actors, public and private, within the mixed decision-making networks (Mayntz, 1999).
What could authenticity mean in this last dimension? It probably consists in fostering the direct access of the tourists to the local markets—the more local the better. Fostering a direct access to the small producers, to restaurants run directly, without any mediation by the major tour operators who like the big operators best; the opportunity to purchase food and wine in local stores or markets (finding the same products just eaten at a restaurant), or even to buy products (milk, cheese, vegetables, fruits) directly from the farmers and the ranchers, thus contributes to the economic maintenance of the local community. The slogan of “zero kilometer,” already well-known in Italy, has grown stronger in recent years, as sustainability has become a cultural value, as evidenced by the widespread practice of GAS, the joint purchasing groups.
A typical example of how to achieve sustainable food tourism is farm tourism. In farm tourism visitors stay in the farmhouse and eat local products. At the same time they have the opportunity to observe many agricultural and animal breeding activities. This type of tourism is addressed both to children in school curricula, as well as to families. In our opinion this type of tourism—that, for a few years, has spread throughout Italy—respects the three dimensions mentioned above (environmental, socio-cultural, economic) of genuine sustainable food tourism. It takes place in a farmhouse nestled in a genuine rural environment conceived for farming and animal breeding, and not as a tourist scene. Here, all the elements of authenticity involved by the farm life are present, even those that tourists unaccustomed to the country might consider unpleasant. The farm life enables the tourists to understand the whole production chain behind the preparation of food, and allows them to eat authentic food. Finally, farm tourism takes place directly at the farm, without any mediation by economic operators: farmers make some profit from this activity, without neglecting their main agricultural activity.
Experiential sustainable food tourism
Today consumers look for products and services that intrigue and stimulate them; they are interested in emotionally and mentally enriching goods that grant holistic, unique, and memorable consumption experiences (Fabris, 2002: 207; Schmitt, 1999; Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982: 132; Addis and Holbrook, 2001: 50). Besides, the increasing demand for entertainment and amusing experiences promotes development in the supply of global experiences, mixtures of activities that were previously offered separately, such as entertainment in restaurants, shopping during holidays, and shows in shopping centers (Fabris, 2002: 207; Ferrari, 2006).
As a consequence, during their holidays modern-day tourists seek new sensations, physically and emotionally enriching experiences. More and more visitors avoid mass holidays and standard tourist packages. In fact, they want to visit places that are different from those sought in the past; they are increasingly willing to grasp the more authentic aspects of a destination and, particularly, those that are linked with local history, traditions, and culture. They search for strong emotions, high involvement, and unusual situations, together with a desire to return to ancient sensations and to rediscover tastes and scents (MacCannell, 1973: 589).
Each tourist experience has two types of components, which may have different levels of importance. These components are: peak experiences (that are linked to out-and-out “tourist” resources, in stark contrast with everyday life) and experiences of support (including auxiliary and ancillary services, such as accommodation, food, etc., which are more easily assimilated to daily experiences, and represent an extension and, at times, an intensification).
As Uriely (2005) points out, in the past the tourist experience has been seen as separate from daily life, as a moment in stark contrast to the everyday, an “out-of-the-ordinary” experience (Urry, 1995: 132). In the social sciences (Moutinho, 1987; Swarbrooke and Horner, 1999) the tourist experience has been considered as a peak experience. In this approach, tourist attractions were not directly related to support services, such as accommodation and catering; they were exclusively related to resources that enable people to live unforgettable and unique experiences, not comparable to those of everyday life, that is to say peak experiences such as rafting, parachute jumping, etc.
Instead, today, visitors are more interested in knowing the everyday life of visited destinations (Richards, 2011). More and more people want to live simple, everyday experiences, and participate in common activities (such as walking, enjoying a simple meal) to reclaim the contemplative time, which seems to have disappeared (Harvey, 1990; Carù and Cova, 2003).
For this reason, perhaps a more correct, sustainable, and complete concept of “experience” has to run right through everyday life, rather than through the “amazing” (magical and fairy-tale) items and entertainment that in the past companies offered to attract tourists. As a consequence, tourist suppliers are highlighting the less visible component of their offer, the support experiences, which include multisensory stimuli, to rediscover daily, authentic, simple things and forgotten aspects of everyday life often overlooked. In this way a new form of cultural tourism, called “creative tourism,” has evolved, which is designed to “provide the creative knowledge to be a local or engage in locally-based forms of creativity” (Richards, 2011). Therefore, the importance and attractiveness of the component of tourism that is closest to everyday experience and is dependent on the fulfillment of basic needs (services and supporting infrastructures) is rising (Quan and Wang, 2004).
Thanks to these changes in tourism, the importance of food and culinary tradition as a tourist resource is also rapidly growing, together with the value of attractions linked to food and wine. More engaging than the simple tasting of food is the active involvement of visitors in more participative and authentic experiences such as food festivals, traditional gastronomic events, gourmet and wine routes, farm holidays, theme and theatrical restaurants, tasting museums, visits to food production places, vineyards, and wineries, etc.
The involvement of residents as a component of tourist products can increase in a sustainable way the experiential value of the holiday, offering unique and unforgettable experiences to visitors (Prentice et al., 1998; Pine and Gilmore, 1999; Quan and Wang, 2004). In fact, the success of tourism is based on the goodwill of local residents and on their hospitality (Gursoy et al., 2002). Despite the fact that it has been overlooked in the literature, the role of residents is very important, because they help to determine both the quality of the tourism experience and the image of the destination. As for the first aspect, the host community is, in fact, one of the three interdependent elements that impact on the tourism experience (together with other tourists and the natural environment) (Wearing and Wearing, 2001). The host community is considered directly and indirectly part of the environmental setting (Jennings and Polovitz Nickerson, 2006: 116) and is a part of the destination’s macro-environment (Kotler et al., 2003: 47).
Local community also has an important role as a supplier of information to potential tourists (Arsal et al., 2010). In addition, residents see things from inside the destination, causing a strong emotional involvement in tourists who come into contact with them and a certain intimacy with a place (Trauer and Ryan, 2005), which increases the value of the tourism experience.
Additionally, good interaction between host community and tourists could be an effective instrument to improve residents’ attitude towards tourism, showing it as a sustainable and non-invasive form of economic development and creating empathy between the two groups. In fact, as Wearing and Wearing (2001: 153) state: “the more the tourist commoditizes and inferiorizes the hosts’ culture, the more the hosts regard the tourist with hostility.” If, on the other hand, residents and tourists share a value system, then visitors behave acceptably for residents and they in turn view tourism favorably. If not, there will be intolerance and there will be no community support for possible tourism development. A positive attitude on the part of residents towards tourists therefore increases the levels of satisfaction, improving the capacity to welcome tourists and the experiential value of the tourist experience creating a favorable climate towards visitors (Harrill, 2004; Ritzner, 1996; Perdue et al., 1990).
In conclusion, the involvement of the host community in tourist offers is a prerequisite for the sustainability of tourism development. In fact, tourist attractions, if presented to visitors as representations of the spirit of the place, are more authentic and compatible with alternative and sustainable forms of tourism. They eventually act as connectors between tourists and residents.
Tourist resources based on local peculiarities, such as culinary traditions and typical agro-food production, may, therefore, become the strengths of tourist brands that represent core values of the community and at the same time points of convergence between the place’s identity and the outward manifestations of local image and the way in which the community represents itself and the image used by tour operators to promote the destination. A very interesting case of an experiential food tourism product, which represents a good example of sustainability in tourism based on a form of experience offered to visitors with the involvement of residents, is Ceneromane (Roman Dinners). It is a community, born in 2012 in Rome, that has adopted an innovative and unconventional hospitality pattern, opening residents’ homes to tourists and sharing a dinner with them. The offer has a cost, is by appointment and strictly reserved to Italian and foreign tourists. The clients are members of online communities and use the Internet to organize their holidays. They are of various ages and are mainly foreign tourists, looking for a personalized travel experience. For the reservation, they can choose the house, together with the menu and the date on the website of Ceneromane. Before joining the project, the hosts that are part of the community have to take an online course.
The network, which today comprises 40 homes in different districts of Rome, offers a home-restaurant service, allowing tourists to live a unique experience. It represents an opportunity for interaction, cultural exchange, and a way to improve the impact of tourism in social terms. Strengths of the offer are the comfort and the priceless feeling of being at home, together with the familiar atmosphere, the Roman traditional menus, and the use of local products. For guests, the dinners are good ways to better get to know the Roman way of life and to have unique experiences, thanks to the renowned hospitality of Italian people.
Every month Ceneromane organizes about 80–100 dinners; the offer is growing and in the future it could interest other cities (probably Torino, Milano, Firenze, Verona, Bari, Lecce, Palermo), as the organization is studying the possibility of expanding to other cities, and creating a national-level network. It represents a sustainable form of tourism, which allows the rediscovery of typical dishes and traditional cuisine, and preserves local food culture, also transmitting it to new targets.
Conclusion
The aim of our work is to present some of the current experiences of sustainable food tourism in Italy through two key components of this type of tourism: authenticity and experience. In fact, tourists today want to have unique, engaging, and authentic experiences that have to be well-connected and closer to the everyday life and culture of the visited places. The selection of such experiences, which are moments of inner growth and self-actualization related to the “living or intangible culture” of destinations (Richards, 2011), is a form of sustainable tourism that is based on the interest in local culture and the co-production of the tourist experience by the tourist him/herself.
The tourists, more aware, sensitive and demanding, want to have unique and authentic experiences related to the culture of the places they visit. As a result, to be more and more competitive and sustainable, food and wine tourism has to focus on two elements that create value for visitors and competitive advantage for firms and destinations: authenticity and experience. These two aspects are linked to the postmodern approach to tourism, which focuses on the exploitation of tourist destinations that are little known and more distant from mass routes.
These elements make tourist products not only more competitive but also more sustainable. In fact, they are elements that encourage the involvement of residents, strengthening local culture and identity and, in some cases, becoming the basis for effective destination branding policies.
In this way, the development of tourism becomes a tool for discovering, rediscovering, and spreading local culture, and also a glue for social fabric, through which the self-esteem and pride of belonging of local people can grow. So tourism has not only an impact in terms of economic flow but also a more significant effect in social terms, becoming an element of cohesion and strengthening of local identity. It can play this role, enhancing food culture and local agricultural production and promoting the conservation of biodiversity, becoming an instrument to protect natural heritage and cultural traditional landscapes.
Our work has produced some specific results. With regard to the experiential dimension in sustainable food tourism, this does not seem to bring out particular problems. On the tour operators’ side, they seem to have understood the importance of the active involvement of the tourist. Therefore, the objectives of the tourists and those of operators and local communities seem, to some extent, to coincide.
There is a difference of opinion about authenticity in sustainable food tourism. On the one hand, it may happen that local communities try to attract tourists by means of a rural landscape that is a bit too bucolic and a cooking that is too sweetened, so as not to upset the tourist. On the other hand, it can also happen that the tourists themselves are not able to enjoy some authentic dishes, because of the softer and sweeter eating habits acquired in urban life.
It follows that a typical problem of authenticity in tourism comes to light: authenticity is a social construction, which must be continuously renegotiated among the various stakeholders. At the same time it may be useful to consider that sustainable food tourism has to be supported or that it should also have some sort of didactic function, which allows tourists with little authentic food experience to be able to distinguish authentic and not authentic food.
Written by Sonia Ferrari and Monica Gilli in "The Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Food and Gastronomy", Edited by Philip Sloan, Willy Legrand and Clare Hindley, First published 2015 by Routledge UK/USA, chapter 29. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.