Food, Place, and Emotion: Authenticity and Innovation in Culinary Tourism

Dear Colleagues,

Food is a powerful medium through which people experience place, memory, and belonging. In tourism, culinary encounters serve not only as sensory pleasures but also as cultural expressions that connect travelers with local identities and collective histories. As global tourism evolves toward more experiential, meaningful, and embodied forms, the relationship between food, emotion, and place becomes central to understanding destination development, identity politics, and cultural sustainability.

This Special Issue conceptualizes culinary tourism not merely as consumption, but as a complex, embodied practice and a form of cultural performance. It moves beyond static notions of authenticity to explore its negotiation and co-construction by producers, consumers, and intermediaries. In particular, we are interested in how foodscapes (both physical and digital) are curated to evoke specific emotions and how concepts like 'terroir' (the taste of place) are mobilized in contemporary tourism narratives.

This Special Issue seeks to advance interdisciplinary dialogue between tourism studies, food studies, cultural geography, and sensory studies. We invite contributions that critically analyze the tensions between heritage preservation and culinary innovation, the role of digital media in shaping culinary desires, and the emotional labor involved in gastronomic service.

Ultimately, this issue aims to provide critical and timely insights into how food-centered experiences contribute to meaningful tourism, community resilience, sustainable local economies, and the contested preservation of cultural landscapes in a globalized world.

This Special Issue welcomes conceptual and empirical papers addressing, but not limited to, the following areas:

• Culinary tourism and the construction of place identity and sense of place.
• Emotional, sensory, and embodied dimensions of gastronomy experiences in tourism.
• The performance and politics of authenticity, nostalgia, and cultural storytelling through cuisine.
• Culinary heritage preservation versus culinary innovation: Tensions, synergies, and sustainable development.
• Local food networks, agritourism, gastronomy entrepreneurship, and community well-being.
• Sustainability and ethics in culinary tourism (e.g., food waste, food sovereignty, animal welfare).
• Cross-cultural perspectives on memory, identity, and the experience of taste.
• Innovative methodologies for researching food, emotion, and place (e.g., sensory ethnography, netnography, GIS).
• Spatial practices, hospitality design, and embodied experiences in culinary tourism.
• Digital representations and online storytelling of food, place, and authenticity.

Prof. Dr. Guojun Zeng
Dr. Zheng Chen
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Tourism and Hospitality is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.