Sally Everett

The Role of Food Tourism in Sustaining Regional Identity: A Case Study of Cornwall, South West England

This exploratory paper examines the role of food tourism in developing and sustaining regional identities within the context of rural regeneration, agricultural diversification and the creation of closer relationships between production and consumption in the countryside. It focuses on Cornwall, South West England, an area with rural development issues, increasing tourism impacts and contested issues of regional identity. A literature and policy analysis, and in-depth interviews with 12 restaurateurs, were undertaken in four popular tourist locations. Correlation was found between increased levels of food tourism interest and the retention and development of regional identity, the enhancement of environmental awareness and sustainability, an increase in social and cultural benefits celebrating the production of local food and the conservation of traditional heritage, skills and ways of life. The paper draws attention to three issues: the role of food tourism in increasing tourist spending, the potential role of food tourism in extending the tourist season, and the re-examination of food tourist typologies within a sustainability framework.

Food and tourism: an effective partnership? A UK-based review

This paper focuses on the role of food tourism in delivering sustainability agendas by examining how the agriculture and tourism sectors have struggled to realise measurable successes because of constraints, conflicting ambitions and low levels of social capital. It focuses on the United Kingdom, which has tasked regional development agencies to adopt food tourism as a means to grow local economies, create jobs and improve natural resources and diversify. In 2009/10, 16 interviews and six workshops were conducted with stakeholders to gauge industry challenges and needs in implementing food tourism. Based on qualitative findings, a model was developed which maps five emergent themes (knowledge exchange, the supply chain, fear of change, regionalisation and marketing) alongside five sustainability principles (strong and just society, good governance, sustainable economy, working within environmental limits and using sound science responsibly). The paper argues that if food tourism is to deliver its purported sustainable benefits, the policy environment must cultivate significant social capital through the cooperation of different industries with varying needs, motivations and challenges through joint marketing schemes, more localised distribution channels and enhanced policy engagement. Scotland and Wales are more successful than England, but overall food and tourism are not yet in effective partnership.

Production places or consumption spaces? The place-making agency of food tourism in Ireland and Scotland

Abstract This article examines the transformation of food production sites into spaces of touristic experience. Traditional food producers are opening their doors to visitors as the popularity of food tourism increases, negotiating a balance between the operation of their business and the drive towards developing new arenas of consumption. An approach that retains spatial, social and cultural influences is advanced to conceptualize the place-making agency of food tourism, whilst theorizing the blurring of work/leisure to explore the merging of work places with leisure spaces. Findings from 32 interviews with producers and 34 interviews with tourists in Ireland and Scotland include the identification of hybrid spaces where consumer needs clash with production requirements; the discovery of producers who create new spaces of consumptive leisure to accommodate touristic interests; the constructive agency of tourist expectations; and insights into how producers alter patterns of traditional production to facilitate growing consumptive demands.

Lessons from the field: Reflecting on a tourism research journey around the 'Celtic periphery'

The challenge within the tourism academy to acknowledge the situated nature of knowledge within the research process is intensifying. Drawing on a multidisciplinary body of reflexive narratives and recent work in tourism that acknowledges the personal influences that construct knowledges, this paper embraces this challenge by offering an autobiographic narration of field work in Ireland, Scotland and Cornwall. Food tourism is employed as a conceptual vehicle to pursue a more culturally focused, critical tourism investigation, thereby contributing to work that extends tourism research beyond the sphere of management and business. Drawing on research involving in-depth interviews with (food) tourists and participant observation, it is suggested that tourism knowledge is constructed at the micro-level, directly shaped by seemingly insignificant or overlooked moments. The paper illustrates how personal aspects of field work (gender, age, ethnicity, personal insecurity, loneliness and physical demands), combined with overcoming more practical issues (weather and transport logistics), should inform the contextual foundations of any empirical research; it from these moments where tourism knowledge is truly cultivated. Underpinned by qualitative methodological literature within a framework of critical realism, it urges others to embark upon a similar reflexive journey in order to develop tourism research into a robust sphere of academic enquiry.

Industry, government, and community: power and leadership in a resource constrained DMO

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore a resource-constrained Destination Marketing Organization (DMO) to assess the power struggles inherent in community tourism initiatives when leadership is weakened through shrinking resources. Design/methodology/approach – Using a comparative instrumental case study approach, this paper analyses three separate studies within Experience Bedfordshire to develop a comprehensive picture of governance within a single tourism destination. Findings – The results show that privately held attractions, hospitality businesses, and transportation authorities retain control over key marketing messages. Visitor and stakeholder surveys indicate that a more sustainable form of rural development, based on natural/cultural attractions and the development of bed and breakfast and artisan small businesses is the preferred development path. Unfortunately, the increasing use of Tourism Information Centres by local residents, as opposed to tourists, has reduced support by key po...

Food Tourism Initiatives:Resistance On The Ground

Food tourism has gained academic and, more recently, political recognition as a potentially sustainable form of tourism development. While state intervention in agriculture policy and the economic context for agricultural production has been long established, a new policy framework that integrates support for farming together with rural development and the environment as a means to create new jobs, protect and improve natural resources, and support rural communities has become evident in food tourism initiatives across the United Kingdom. These interventions are partly a response to the Policy Commission on the Future of Farming and Food (PCFFF) and have resulted in increased emphasis and programme development in food tourism as a means to support rural agricultural areas. It is argued that the economic motivations behind these policy developments are derived from two sources: utility goals that concern the contribution of the farming sector towards the overall health of the economy; and equity goals that focus on the provision of satisfactory incomes for rural populations. In preparation for a new national food tourism website, a series of stakeholder interviews were conducted to gauge industry challenges in implementing food tourism across the UK. Within an established top-down approach to agricultural development, local and regional food organisations have developed food tourism initiatives with the mindset that producers need information and persuasion in order to engage with emerging tourism supply chains. Common challenges to this tactic include the geographical dispersion of producers; confusing and conflicting information available on best practices; and identifying the varying needs between small and large farm operations. However, additional struggles have been identified relating to the differing social identities of the meaning

Leveraging physical and digital liminoidal spaces: the case of the #EATCambridge festival

ABSTRACT This paper conceptualises the way physical and digital spaces associated with festivals are being harnessed to create new spaces of consumption. It focuses on the ways local food businesses leverage opportunities in the tourist-historic city of Cambridge. Data from a survey of 28 food producers (in 2014) followed by 35 in-depth interviews at the EAT Cambridge food festival (in 2015) are used to explain how local producers overcome the challenges of physical peripherality and why they use social media to help support them challenges restrictive political and economic structures. We present a new conceptual framework which suggests the development of place through food festivals in heritage cities can be understood by pulling together the concepts of ‘event leveraging’, ‘liminoid spaces’ (physical and digital) and modes of ‘creative resistance’ which helps the survival of small producers against inner city gentrification and economically enforced peripherality.

Engaging and training students in the development of inclusive learning materials for their peers

ABSTRACT With equal access requirements and increasing rates of enrolment of students with disabilities in higher education, universities must find appropriate and efficient ways to create accessible materials which benefit and support all students. In response to cuts to disability funding, issues relating to the provision of an inclusive curriculum are now dominating institutional policy and educational discourses. This paper reports on a trans-Atlantic project which utilised student employees to convert and develop inclusive learning materials for their peers, with the expressed purpose of piloting a sustainable intervention method generalisable to meeting similar needs of diverse universities for inclusive material provision and a future workforce aware of disability issues and accommodations. Qualitative in-depth interviews with ten students (eight UK and two US) find that involving student employees in the delivery of inclusive materials improves partnerships and attitudes around disability and accessibility measures.

Transformation, meaning-making and identity creation through folklore tourism: the case of the Robin Hood Festival

ABSTRACT Folklore tourism is often regarded as a subset of heritage tourism, although it has received less attention than comparable heritage events based on documented historic events such as civil war re-enactments and living history sites. Although the ‘theming’ of landscapes and the journeying to places based on their literary association enjoys a long tradition, this paper focuses on the relationship between tourism and folklorism. It explores how folklore events appropriate contemporary and social interpretations of stories to entertain whilst also outlining how legendary historical personalities can play a role in generating tourism. In 2013, a constructivist methodology was employed using 20 in-depth interviews and participant observations to generate qualitative data at the Robin Hood Festival in Nottinghamshire, UK. Numerous themes emerged after coding including the way folklore events blend historic fact and fiction, the power of the imagination to create spaces, and the importance of natural settings and spaces to transform people and places. However, three dominant themes emerged which are specifically presented in this paper, these are: (a) a sense of freedom and escape felt by participants, (b) camaraderie and inter-personal social authenticity and (c) the transformation of self and creation of alternative (additional) social identities.