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Abstract
Over the past fifteen years, Americans and Canadians have become increasingly interested in and conscious of the sources of their food. Local food movements such as farmers’ markets and community supported agriculture have expanded dramatically in popularity. This study focuses on a heretofore unexamined aspect of this phenomenon, the widespread rise in use of local food and agriculture in tourism marketing. Nearly absent in 1993 promotions, “eating locally” is now a cornerstone of tourism advertising by states and provinces. This study examines the ways that local food is employed in tourism booklets, and by extension, the desires of the travelers to whom such booklets are targeted.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Pete Shortridge for the term paper assignment in 1993 that gave me half of my data set, to Lisa Schnell for insightful comments and editing and for allowing me to haul around 45 pounds of tourism brochures through several moves, and to Alyson Greiner and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful critiques of earlier drafts of this paper.
Notes
1. All states and provinces also have websites, but I used their paper booklets for consistency in comparing 1993 with 2008. While the Web has undoubtedly become an important source for those planning a vacation, these paper booklets are still relevant. They are typically long (often over 100 pages), full-color productions; promoters clearly see the expense as worthwhile. In 2008, New York had an odd custom-made publication that tourists could order. After selecting a few key themes and regions, the traveler is sent a fairly skimpy booklet with only a few sections relevant to the boxes they checked. To obtain a more comparable broad overview, I used all the main pages of New York's tourist promotion website as the basis for my analysis. In 1993, Indiana never sent a booklet after repeated requests, so they are not included in my 1993 analysis. They were also the lone holdout in 2008; however, an online PDF version of their print booklet was available, which I used. Note also that Nunavut formed in 1999, and therefore is not included in the 1993 analysis.
2. Content analysis, based as it is on dozens of arbitrary decisions by the researcher, is not without its limitations. When trying to figure out how much weight to give a particular entry, for example, is a one-page photo equivalent to a thousand words? What about a small writeup on page two, compared with a full page on page 67? Content analysis also relies on discrete categorization of images or phrases (see, e.g., Lew Citation1991). But anybody who has ever attempted a categorical content analysis of visual or textual images knows full well that images and words often have a multiplicity of meanings and possible categorizations. Thus, the precise quantification offered by content analysis is a false one. Despite the lengths to which researchers may go to preserve the illusion of “objective” truth (see, e.g., Sirakaya and Sonmez Citation2000), in the end, the results are loaded with the researcher's subjective interpretations.
3. It is important not to overstate the applicability of my findings to the population as a whole. Those who request such booklets are not necessarily a representative cross-section of North American tourists. For example, although I have not carried out a formal analysis, it appears that individuals pictured in the booklets are disproportionately white, for example, which would seem to indicate a similar complexion of the recipients. It also seems likely that, given their focus on drumming up tourist dollars for the state, that they are aimed more at middle and upper-class travelers. In general, the audience for these booklets appears to be the more long-distance (or at least the out-of-state) traveler. Although exact figures varied, most states and provinces that I contacted indicated that the percentage mailed to out-of-state addresses ranged between 80 and 90 percent of the total. This was just as true of states with a large tourist industries as for those less frequented by travelers.
4. The trend towards promotion of local produce was clearly well established by a few years earlier, when Tastykake (a brand of baked snack foods found in the Mid-Atlantic region) played off of it in an advertisement on the back cover of New Jersey's 2005 tourism guide, which proclaimed that “produce is not the only fresh thing in New Jersey,” atop boxes of several of its signature products.
5. Agritourism has been established in Europe much longer than in the United States (e.g., Ilbery et al. Citation1998; Armesto López and Gómez Martín 2006) and is also found in many other parts of the world as well (e.g. Torres 2002; Knowd 2006). In response to economies of scale required by industrial food production, small farmers have turned to other enterprises in order to survive, and agritourism has taken its place alongside farmers’ markets, community-supported agriculture, and other forms of direct marketing as alternative survival strategies (Nickerson et al. Citation2001; Che et al. Citation2005, Citation2006; Wilson et al. Citation2006; Veeck et al. Citation2006; Colton and Bissix 2005).
6. Many states also have websites devoted specifically to agritourism; see, for example, www.oklahomaagritourism.com, www.tnvacation.com/agritourism, and www.kansasagritourism.org.
7. One exception to this: Pumpkin-picking children, whether in 1993 or 2008, were ubiquitous.
8. A few states and provinces, most notably British Columbia, Saskatchewan, and Oregon, and to a lesser degree, Michigan, had emphasis on local food and agriculture in 1993 that would not be out of place in 2008. However, even these places increased their coverage of local foods markedly by 2008.
9. In Canada, there has been an organized move to promote regional cuisine by forming alliances between growers, chefs, vintners, and others involved at all sections of the food chain (Telfer Citation2001; Fraser Citation2003a, 2003b).
10. While celebrity chefs are nothing new, the launch of The Food Network on cable television in 1993 kicked it up a notch.
11. Slow Food began in Italy and is today found throughout the developed world. It is a movement that emphasizes enjoyment of food as well as conscious attempts to preserve local food traditions, recipes, landscapes, and production techniques (Petrini et al. Citation2001).
12. One constantly sees in evidence the influence of 1000 Places to Visit Before You Die (Schultz Citation2003) and all of its various sequels and knockoffs.
13. North Dakota is alone in its overt embrace of the imagery of large-scale agribusiness alongside the more typical, small-scale agricultural attractions: “This is the essence of North Dakota. Real ranches producing the best steaks in the world. Combines harvesting wheat to supply 100 nations. Semis hauling corn to ethanol plants and barley to breweries.” Not coincidentally, North Dakota has the seventh-largest average farm size in the United States, behind Wyoming, Arizona, New Mexico, Montana, Nevada, and South Dakota (USDA 2002).