Abstract

Cuisine is influenced by cultural and geographical conditions such as climate. Through tourism and travel, people can enjoy regional cuisine. Tasting farm products and cuisine at farm villages has become popular in recent years. This kind of tour is planned by city travel agencies and travel writers through a horizontal alliance with the NGOs or local communities. The horizontal alliance not only offers a new stage for cuisine demonstration, but also triggers a revolution in personal taste by participating in the introduction to this phenomenon. The material culture, community culture and spiritual culture reflected by the regional cuisine are demonstrated through taste-based tourism comprising fresh ingredients, faces of hard-working people, homemade cooking, farm village dishes, and hostels renovated from pigsties. The tour guides the travellers to experience the traditional food culture of more than two hundred years, since the eighteenth century. This paper, through images, language, ideologies and time, analyses the regional cuisine tourism in detail regarding its development, planning strategies and imaginative projections. It also analyses how a tour experience, like visiting a biology museum, can actualize theories of theatre anthropology, including aspects like nostalgia, text and stage, restoration of behaviour, and historiography. To a certain degree, cuisine tourism creates positive self-identification and a new historical evolution for local residents.