Twelfth International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

Scholars examine increasingly the role of heritage tourism in fueling nostalgic, romantic perceptions of place that link visitors to problematically idealized pasts, but culinary tourism’s ability to heighten these place-based mythologies remains underexplored. Forms of culinary tourism in the Appalachian region of the United States, for example, continue to glorify Scots-Irish and other white ancestral histories through celebrating particular foods. We contend that attending to the rhetoric of Southern Appalachian migration identifies how foodways tourism narratives privilege particular stories, values, and people. Greater attention to migration, or the stories of the movement of people, crops, and goods, helps show instead how food cultures often reflect a complicated cultural interdependence. We first highlight how regions, particularly Appalachia and Scotland from which some of its settlement descends, are rhetorical inventions, examining how culinary tourism privileges one Appalachian imaginary amid numerous inventional rhetorical possibilities. Developing a theoretical framework drawn from migration scholarship, we rhetorically analyze three examples based on fieldwork in Scotland and Appalachia, illustrating how contemporary culinary tourism echoes in “hillbilly” experiences or offers different experiences. Tracing migration stories helps uncover how rhetorical uses of tradition and heritage in promoting Scotland’s food and drink experiences reverberate in Appalachia hundreds of years later, and how they could be interpreted differently. Viewing culinary tourism as an unfolding process, rather than as a product to consume, emphasizes that there are new meanings that can be circulated when we travel to Appalachia and elsewhere.