Carol Kline, ed. New York, NY: Routledge, 2018. xvi and 181 pp., illustrations, contributors, index. $155.00 cloth (ISBN 978-1-138-29160-7); $54.95 electronic (ISBN 978-1-315-26520-9).
Several years ago, my sister and I were fortunate enough to take a vacation to Costa Rica, where we spent ten days enjoying the beaches, exploring the volcanic hot springs, rainforest hiking, and the overall hospitality of the country. We were happily living the tourist lifestyle until it all came crashing into reality one sunny afternoon. We had joined another small group in renting a boat for a guided snorkel trip and we were floating around watching the fish and watching the guide point to various hiding creatures when he suddenly left and went back to the boat. He returned with a spear and proceeded to dive down and stab into the rocks, eventually coming up with an impaled octopus. He tried to show us the dying animal, but I immediately became hysterical and began screaming at him in English (which he didn't speak) and then screamed at the boat captain (who did speak English) that we did not pay to have them kill ocean life—we paid to have them show us and teach us about it. The guide took the dying octopus back to the boat and tossed it in a cooler while I sulked in and out of the water. The boat captain explained to me that the guide would get a substantial amount of money for that octopus from the local restaurants to supplement his income—claiming that there was no difference in tourists seeing animals in the water or eating them.
At the time this happened, I was working on my PhD in animal geography and was in the midst of doing some very difficult (intellectually and emotionally) reflecting on human–animal relations. In addition, octopus are a personal favorite animal and I did not eat meat or seafood. My outburst that afternoon was embarrassing to my sister and awkward for the rest of the tourists, the captain, and guide. I was sure they were all thinking: What was the big deal? I would never have seen the octopus without the guide's skilled eyes and what did I care if he got some extra money and someone had a fancy dinner? I sat there thinking: What is wrong with everyone? How can someone be thrilled to see an octopus and then stab it to death? How can all these people just eat all these animals with no thought to their lives? If I'd had Carol Kline's edited volume Animals, Food and Tourism back then, I'm not sure that would have prevented my “freak out,” but it might have helped me understand the full complexity of the tourist–animal–local nexus with a bit more manners, allowing me to explore the conflict rather than refusing to engage it because I was so upset.
This traumatic memory came back in full force while reading this much-needed collection and led me on a memory walk down a number of personal animal-related traumas as a tourist here in the United States and internationally. The power of a book such as this is that it both synthesizes and deconstructs the animals–food–tourism relationship in a manner that makes it surprising that this is such a new strand of academic exploration and yet involves such a complexity of forms. After all, “animals as food or as food for animal attractions is one of the most, if not the most, significant and pervasive use of animals in tourism” (p. 2). This is because “the suspension of traditional ethical norms, the desire to explore the exotic, or to partake in the authentic experience, all serve as incentives to experience the destination with little concern for the consequences of these actions” (p. 2).
The volume sits squarely at the intersection of three major geographic subfields—food, tourism, and animal geographies—and contains thirteen chapters (the first and last are introductory and summary) as well as a small number of black-and-white figures and tables. The eleven main chapters span the globe (Australia, Brazil, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Norway, United States) as well as a range of species (goats, kangaroos, lobsters, pigs, reindeer, seals, whales) and groups of animals (“farm animals,” “seafood”). There is even an entire chapter on vegan tourism—and the impact of trying to avoid eating animals all together while traveling. Methodologically, the chapters are very small-scale studies using discourse analysis, ethical and ecofeminist theories, and general thought pieces. Data sources include Web sites, interviews, surveys, and research data on things like animal populations. Interestingly, and a shortcoming of the volume in my view, is that not one case study actually spoke in depth to tourists in any of the studied locales. It is unclear if this was by design or if this is a matter of this type of research being so new, but some attempt to get at the perspectives, experiences, and logics of tourists would have enriched the overall argument of the volume about the complexity of the animals-as-food tourist experience.
Saying this is one of the few works on animals, tourism, and food is not to say that animals have not been visible within tourism research. Indeed, the “animal turn” seen across the academy over the past few decades has changed our understandings about, and categorizations of, animals. It is recognized now that animals are subjects in their own right and that categorizing them as objects, resources, or commodities is contributing to a dramatic loss of biodiversity and an immense amount of cruelty toward sentient beings. In tourism research specifically, however, work on animals began about thirty years ago with the conservation and ecotourism perspective where questions about how living animals were better for conservation and long-term tourist economies than dead ones. Interestingly, these arguments about living animals were not based on the inherent value of the animal in and of itself, but on the value animals could bring to tourist economies (e.g., wildlife safaris, trophy hunting, bird watching, etc.). Questions around the ethics of animals in tourism have emerged within the subfield in the last decade or so and the range of topics has expanded to include studying the ways in which animals are used to promote tourist locations, policy and management analyses, and a deeper interrogation of the use of captive animals in places like zoos, aquariums, and marine mammal parks. The topics being studied have largely followed movements in global society toward more concern for how animals are being treated. For example, travel sites like Expedia and Travelocity have implemented policies to monitor which animal attractions are sold and advertised on their portals.
Even with all the spotlights being put on animals in tourism, there is one glaring oversight that this volume addresses: the use of animals as food either for humans or for other animals in tourism. Animals used as food for tourism is so invisible as a topic that even the United Nations World Tourism Association Global Code of Ethics “makes no mention of the ethical implications of animal consumption either as food or as food for attractions” (p. 3). This volume makes abundantly clear that any push for sustainable, alternative, or transformative tourism must grapple with what tourists and tourism providers are doing to sustain animal lives for the animals themselves—not purely as commodities for humans. The heart of the tourist experience is place—we all go to visit places to relax, explore, and experience something different or new. Often it is the food that epitomizes the entire tourist experience so how, where, when, and why certain animals become linked to places as food becomes the heart of the volume's inquiry.
Bryan Blankfield's essay on David Foster Wallace's 2004 essay, “Consider the Lobster,” in Gourmet magazine argues that perhaps instead of tourism being focused on escapism, it could be “an arduous opportunity for moral introspection” (p. 20). Based on his experience at the Maine Lobster Festival in the United States, Wallace's essay was revolutionary for a food magazine predicated on attracting people to various locations for food consumption. Instead of extended descriptions of succulent buttered lobster meat, greasy fingers, and community fun, Wallace explored who lobsters actually are as a species, what the experience of being cooked alive might be like for them, and what the display of gluttony might mean for gustatory ethics. Wallace did all this without taking on an animal rights tone and he did not come to his own conclusions. The value of his essay, for Blankfield, is how Wallace gave “a rhetorical performance that provides readers with a model for enacting gustatory ethics and critical tourism in their own lives” (p. 13).
For Gino Jafet Quintero Venegas and Álvaro López López, this type of critical gustatory thinking is absent in the case of cabrito—or roasted kid (baby goat)—a delicacy marketed as essential to any visit to Monterrey, Mexico. The kids themselves are killed after thirty to forty days of minimal food (normally only goat milk) and maximum confinement, which keeps the flesh extremely tender but does not allow for any normal goat behavior or experiential life. In addition, the method of slaughter, slitting the throat and letting the blood drain out, causes extreme pain and distress for the last several minutes of their short lives. In tracing the ways in which cabrito is marketed to tourists, they demonstrate the close links between place and animal bodies. Even though cabrito is a leftover import from the time of Spanish colonization, Monterrey's tourism industry has effectively marketed cabrito as a “true” Mexican dish and what López and Venegas call a “tourist synecdoche” (p. 39) where having access to a part (i.e., cabrito) is enough to experience the whole (i.e., Monterrey and Mexico). Taking their analysis even further, they bring in a discussion of the role of masculinity—which via Mexican notions of machismo includes a rough treatment of animals—in perpetuating this food source as culturally legitimate.
Although most people do not travel to tourist spots to see living lobsters or baby goats, they do travel to see whales. Chapters by Georgette Leah Burns et al. and Stephen Wearing et al. explore the complicated intersection of traveling to see animals—living in the wild—and then choosing to consume them as food in Iceland and Japan. In the case of Iceland, tourist surveys revealed that “whaling and sealing were unacceptable under any circumstances, suggesting an ethical stance that may stem from an appreciation of animals having intrinsic value. The willingness to eat whale and seal meat, however, contradicts this” (p. 31). The willingness to eat this type of meat was linked to the marketing of Iceland as an exotic place and the ignorance of tourists when it comes to Icelandic cultural traditions—for example, seals have been a resource for Iceland over the long term, but whales have not. This “cognitive dissonance” (p. 31) of wanting to see whales because you care about them yet turn around and want to eat them is also seen in Japan, a country with an ongoing controversy over their treatment of whales. Wearing et al. document how “there is a catch-22 in the use of whale meat for food tourism; as animals like whales are commodified as food for tourists, this creates a demand and associated view of whales as meat, so while it also ensures that tourists are aware of whale and issues relating to their existence, they can come to value them as a commodified food source rather than as a protected species” (p. 160), thereby possibly jeopardizing the very survival of whales.
As Cadi Y. Fung shows, animals as food for humans is not the only consideration when it comes to the animals, food, and tourism nexus. In her case study of tourists coming to see the Amazon River dolphin in Brazil, she shows how the provisioning of fish as bait for the dolphins is lightly regulated but largely unmonitored and is changing resident relations to the dolphins because they are increasingly competing for the same fish. In addition, the feeding of the dolphins is possibly changing their behavior by causing them to migrate less to find food, which ends up increasing locals' conflict with the dolphins. For Fung, “it is important to recognize the extent to which non-human animals are dependent on the same resources on which humans are dependent, and to what degree we can consider the use of food animals in animal tourism an unnecessary luxury, or an excessive use of a dwindling resource” (p. 53).
The usefulness of this book for students is the breadth of the case studies and the clarity of the writing. In addition, the inclusion of examples from around the world will mean that all students will have some personal experience with animals from their own tourism experiences—whether locally or internationally—and will be able to effectively link them to course work on food, tourism, or animal geographies. For researchers, the volume is an effective guide to the myriad future directions this research could take with one of the main methodological questions being how to access and collect data on a subject (eating animals) that is “heavy” or “off-putting” for a person trying to enjoy their hard-earned vacation.
Overall, this volume is a solid contribution to animal, food, and tourism geographies and across the social sciences because of its clear synthesis of the topic and the evidence presented showing that being a tourist is getting more and more complicated. It is especially important to see work on animal ethics moving into other geographic subfields besides animal geography. As Kline writes in the closing chapter, “tourism experiences have an opportunity to change minds because people are open to receiving new information” (p. 176)—I would say this applies just as equally to all those studying food and tourism.
ORCiD
Julie Urbanik 
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1009-4173