The Food Adventurers

Do you pick your holiday destination based on the local food? Discover how the phenomenon evolved over the last 200 years in this thoughtful book. From the golden age of steamships to the glamorous era of aeroplane travel, Professor Daniel E. Bender recounts the birth of modern food tourism through the meals eaten by the first people to travel for pleasure and write about it. * Delicious *
The heroine of this book is the delightful Juanita Harrison, an Afro-American free spirit who cheerfully travelled the world in the 1930s . . . The book is subtitled ‘How Around-the-World Travel Changed the Way We Eat’ and the author keeps doggedly to the task. -- Jason Goodwin * Country Life *
Daniel Bender, a professor of food studies in Toronto, suggests people are quite right to be nervous of new eating experiences especially the ‘fiery torments’ of curries and spices, which can burn the mouth ‘like a live coal’ and ‘cause tears to flow’ . . . Nevertheless, there have always been hardy souls who positively enjoy tracking down bizarre lunches and dinners. -- Roger Lewis * The Daily Mail *
Daniel Bender charts the way travel (especially the pre-war around-the-world variety) transformed what we eat . . . There are characters aplenty, such as Austrian travel writer Ida Pfeiffer, in this entertaining study of tourism and galloping gourmets. * Sydney Morning Herald *
Bender [is] eminently qualified to embark on what he describes as "an eating trip around the world". The result of this undertaking is a tale of food adventure revealed through six travellers, two fruits, two hotel chains, "one meal and a glass of water". Bender brings to light the personalities, quirks and bravery of his characters . . . The narrative is packed with amusing anecdotes, some quite audacious . . . The book, dare one day it, is a delicious gastronomic expedition into the histories of global travel and cuisine. -- Jules Stewart * Geographical *
From mangosteen fruit discovered in a colonial Indonesian marketplace to the caviar served in the dining saloon of a cruise liner, this [book] charts the history of eating while travelling, as well as the growing fascination with world cuisines. -- Caroline Sanderson * The Bookseller *
Drawing on contemporaneous diaries, photographs, and cookbooks, Bender provides a window into the twin attitudes of fascination and exoticization that often defined Western perspectives toward international foods and peoples, and explores such issues as colonization, globalization, and cultural appropriation. It’s a riveting study. * Publishers Weekly *
Circumnavigating the globe has fascinated tourists for hundreds of years. Bender considers the world traveler from 1840 to 1975 and what foods they ate, "discovered," avoided, and whined about . . . Throughout the book, Bender deftly grapples with tourists' tensions in their quest for balance among authenticity, exoticism, comfort, luxury, familiarity, experience, safety, novelty, and ultimately a story to impress, disgust, or titillate one's compatriots back home. These historic tensions resonate today. Bender's writing is erudite yet accessible. Extensive notes, many from close readings of travelogues and other primary sources, will please scholars. Historic photos and menus enrich the text. . . . Recommended. * Choice *
Drawing on an extensive collection of diaries, letters, photographs, and cookbooks, The Food Adventurers takes us on a culinary expedition around the world via six travellers, offering insights into Westerners’ fascination with foreign cultures and cuisines, whilst simultaneously examining issues such as globalisation, cultural appropriation, and colonisation. Bender explores, over the last 200 years, the conflict between tourists’ apparent – and professed – desire for authenticity, and their longing for comfort, familiarity, and luxury. -- Sophie Richmond * The ASLEF Journal *
The most interesting point that Bender makes is that although culinary tourism has become widespread . . . tourists are still adjured not to drink the water and not to experiment with "foreign foods" lest they contract "Delhi Belly," "Montezuma’s Revenge" and similar ailments . . . World cuisines may have changed with the addition of strange (to the West) foodstuffs, but perceptions of unfamiliar food and drink (mainly) in the global south seem not to have changed at all. Why this is true is the most interesting idea for further exploration. * Culinary Historians of Canada, 'Digestible Bits and Bites' *
For generations, food adventurers have searched for new culinary experiences . . . Professor of Food Studies Daniel E. Bender [writes] about the links between international travel, culture and diet. * The Sunday Post, Scotland *
Finally, someone has written a book about the hypocrisy (or maybe just “ambiguity”) of gastro-tourism and how it has been marketed. But who knew this story could be presented as funny and ironic? From the colonial Dutch East Indies rijsttafel to Anthony Bourdain, Bender traces the nearly two-hundred-year history of the tug-of-war between tourists’ professed desire for authenticity and their need for comfort and familiarity. * Paul Freedman, Chester D. Tripp Professor of History, Yale University, and author of American Cuisine *
This is a richly rewarding and exquisitely detailed book about food adventuring from the sailboat, through the steamship, to the jet plane, putting each instance in painstaking infrastructural and cultural context. What happens when a roving imperial appetite meets the hospitable yet marginalized other? How is one person's adventure turned into another person's physical and emotional labour? In addressing these questions, TheFood Adventurers suggests that there is no way to disentangle the cultural politics of travel from the political economics of underdevelopment. * Krishnendu Ray, Professor of Food Studies, New York University, and author of The Ethnic Restaurateur *