The world on a ship: producing cosmopolitan dining on mass-market cruises

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes how mass-market cruise lines mobilize food, laborers, and built environments to offer passengers cosmopolitanism with the purpose of maintaining a unique business model. It is argued that while companies target a growing demand for culturally immersive dining experiences, they do not seek to offer complete immersion in any one culture but cosmopolitanism through a combination of multiple themed establishments on a mobile platform. Culinary themes are installed using labor and built environments, for instance through the placement of visual and material culture in eateries. While some onboard dining experiences are themed around the cultures of nations on the ship’s itinerary, many evoke international cultures. In studying how mass-market cruise ships as mobile spaces of containment combine both international and localized dining experiences to offer the “world on a ship,” scholars of tourism can better understand how touristic companies produce cosmopolitanism at destinations.

KEYWORDS:

• Culinary tourism
• cruise industry
• cosmopolitanism
• immersive dining
• cultural tourism

Acknowledgement

I thank Amy Bentley, Eda Kranakis, and three anonymous reviewers for their invaluable suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Lucy M. Long discusses how food can be used to travel without leaving home (2004).

2. “On discussions about mobilities, take for instance Chandra D. Bhimull’s work on how those traveling in planes during the 1930s viewed colonized individuals differently by performing aboveness, “Reshaping Empire: Airline Travelers and Colonial Encounters in the 1930s,” Transfers 3, no. 1 (2013): 45–64; Empire in the Air: Airline Travel and the African Diaspora. (New York University Press, 2017). See Wolfgang Schivelbusch who examines how nineteenth-century railway travelers experienced space/time compression for one example of railway mobilities, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2014). For the politics of automobile travel in postwar America see Seiler (2003); Cohen (1996). Christopher Schaberg analyzes how airport passengers consume texts in those spaces (2012).

3. © 2019 The Independent Traveler, Inc. d/b/a Cruise Critic was used for analysis and visualisation. All passenger accounts included in this article were obtained from Cruise Critic.

4. For more background on the place of social media in tourism, see Molz (2012).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shayan S. Lallani

Shayan S. Lallani is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of Ottawa. His research examines how mass-market cruise lines in the American market produced cultural encounters through dining experiences in the late twentieth century.