Food is essential fuel for the body, but for many millions of holidaymakers who travel around the world, it is also an expression of a country’s history, culture and culinary traditions. The destinations analysed in this report – a mixture of cities and countries to reflect the diversity of the global food movement, namely Barcelona, New Orleans, Norway, Peru, Singapore and Turkey – illustrate these aspects of foreign food, as well as the number of international visitors those destinations attract every year.

For food tourists, sampling local (and regional) cuisine incorporates many of the qualities they seek – authenticity (especially if they are able to meet farmers and/or food producers and talk to them first-hand), the ‘right’ kind of nourishment (organic produce that is grown close by) and excitement (when the dishes are unfamiliar, with exotic ingredients).

Sampling unusual food is a source of pleasure for foodies and they will travel to the ends of the earth to do so. Food tourism, however, comes in many forms. It does not necessarily include an activity far from home. It could be visiting a neighbourhood farmers’ market (New York City alone has 146 such markets) or sailing down the Rhône in a riverboat and hopping ashore to sample local wines.

Wine is an essential accompaniment to good food but in recent years, beer – specifically craft beer – has taken off, notably in North America. The US Craft Brewers’ Association estimates that there are now 2,822 small-scale breweries across the country, representing 7.8% of the total beer market.

Craft beer – ‘liquid’ food in a sense – appeals to travellers who like their produce to be endowed with an artisanal touch. The breweries, for their part, have become part of the tourism industry, organising beer festivals, offering guided brewery visits and designing driving routes to lure foodies to their doors.

The popularity of food-related tours (with or without wine and beer) has soared, with travel companies offering everything from culinary walking tours in cities such as Prague, London and Amsterdam, to cooking courses in Italy (to cite a random example). A feature of many such tours is the opportunity to learn about the local terroir, how and where the food is grown, getting insider tips from the people who produce the food, collecting recipes and, of course, sampling the end product.

Through their love of all things culinary, augmented by the plethora of cooking shows and online information, food tourists are becoming almost as expert as the chefs and food producers for whom creating innovative, nutritious food is a profession, not just a passion.

This report looks at the following areas:

• Why are spas considered to be part of the food tourism industry?

• How have multicultural populations fuelled an interest in foreign food?

• What are the most effective ways of marketing food tourism?

• Why are older foodies dominating the food tourism market?

• Why have Singapore’s restaurants gone upmarket?

Most people are familiar with the ‘kitchen French’ phrases used in the culinary world such as maitre d’ (for a head waiter), table d’hôte (fixed priced menu with a limited choice of dishes) and so on, but a number of terms have crept into certain areas of food tourism that are not always so obvious. They are however, ubiquitous, so a brief explanation is in order.

This somewhat vague term has largely taken over where ‘fusion’ food left off. (Fusion food is a blend of cooking techniques featuring unusual food pairings from diverse cultures – typically Western and Asian.) Some of the methods used in contemporary cuisine are ‘sous-vide’ (vacuum cooking, which conserves flavour by heating food in airtight plastic bags), slow cooking (cooking for a long time at low temperatures) and molecular gastronomy – food preparation that uses scientific techniques to cut down on cooking time.

This description is a bit of a misnomer because it is actually based on the traditional methods of preparing Scandinavian food such as drying, smoking, pickling, curing etc, which has been employed over many centuries. New Nordic cuisine is sometimes referred to as New Scandinavian cooking, which is also the name of a popular cooking show. This type of cuisine has helped to put Norway on the food tourism map. (See the Food Tourism destinations section of this report.)

This is using virtually every part of an animal, including the blood, giblets, bones, tongue and offal. A long-time promoter of the nose-to-tail philosophy is British chef and restaurant owner Fergus Henderson. His London restaurant, St John in Smithfield, has been showcasing this type of cuisine for more than a couple of decades. Henderson has also written a number of books on the joys of what he views as traditional British cooking.

This is the buzzword of the moment and a ‘hook’ on which many tourism authorities are branding their particular corner of the world. Responding to society’s concerns about the hazards of industrial farming (real or perceived) and ‘manufactured’ produce, which employs additives, preservatives, genetically modified vegetables etc, regional cuisine is typically marketed as fresh, local and (often) organic food, that is produced in small-scale family-run farms. Phrases used to describe such produce include foods that come ‘from the farm to the fork’, ‘from the field to the fork’, ‘from the farm to the table’ (and variations thereof).

The antithesis of fast food, this movement, which promotes regional cuisine based on traditional farming practices (for crops and livestock) and the local terroir, originated in Italy. Regional cuisine (sometimes also referred to as ‘authentic’ cuisine) is one of that country’s major tourist draws.

This is a hard-to-define French word (but widely used throughout the food tourism industry) that refers to the characteristics of a local soil created by a blend of climate, geography and geology. Terroir is said to imbue regional produce (especially wines) with a flavour and texture unique to a particular area.