Local Gastronomy: A Tasty Tourist Attraction in Turkey

Abstract

As competition between destination countries increases, their differentiating characteristics become more important for attracting tourists. Lately, as a marker of local culture, gastronomy has become an important factor in destination identity formation and could be used successfully to differentiate between very similarly looking mass tourism destinations. Gastronomic tourism refers to travels outside one’s place of residence with the main purpose of learning about and/or tasting foods and drinks that do not belong to one’s culinary system. Defined this way, gastronomic tourism also includes visiting food museums and vineyards or wineries, as well as attending food festivals. The purpose of this chapter is to identify Turkey’s potential to develop gastronomic tourism, create a map of regional foods and drinks, and evaluate the significance of gastronomic tourism for Turkey. This chapter found that although Turkish cuisine is characterized by great regional and local variety, gastronomy is not used as a promotion tool to market Turkey to tourists, and the diverse regional cuisines are rarely mentioned in the official Turkish tourism promotional materials. Although, more recently, the number of gastronomic tourists has been increasing, more needs to be done to transform food into an important tool in destination image building.