In a tourism destination, food is one of the core elements for tourists to experience the destination’s attractiveness and obtain an unforgettable memory. Previous food tourism literesearchature has gone through three stages from the producer-oriented (investigate the destination food itself) to co-creative (tourists’ involvement in destination food consumption) and then to the holistic and relational perspective (foodscape) ^[1][7]. In this process, a contradictory nexus exists between destination food and tourists. Tourists, to different degrees, are eager to experience novel and exotic tastes during travel. At the same time, the domestic stomach and diet habits may constantly interrupt them from really enjoying the divergent food for too long ^[2][3][4][5][9,10,11,12]. Hence, tourists would be more likely to seek a balance between the exotic and familiar, leading them to step in the direction of seeking proper foods in this cross-cultural interface. Previous scholars have explored some modes of tourists’ food consumption to solve this contradiction, such as eating fast food or buying local ingredients but cooking by themselves ^[5][6][12,13].

However, in this process, not only the food itself but also the physical settings, dining etiquettes, human interactions, and atmospheres all express different familiar and novel stories. They are linked and experienced by tourists. Thus, along with the encounters between different destinations and tourist-generating cultures, multifarious foodscapes with multiple mixed experiences are created ^[7][8][14,15]. Then, an in-depth investigation into framing the types and connotations of destination foodscapes in specific contexts is warranted. It could reveal how tourists, destination places and foodstuffs interact as a network to produce a satisfying food experience, thus benefiting the destination gastronomic industry and tourism development.

The travelogs posted by tourists online provide a rich database to explore this question. The Web 2.0 era endow individual tourists a chance to save and share their food memory during a trip by publishing their photographs and travel notes on the online tourism agencies (OTA) social media anywhere with the help of a computer/smartphone and the internet ^[9][10][16,17]. The pictures and words they post represent their gaze of the destination, their embodied experiences of certain foods, and their emotional feelings on-site. They elaborately select pictures and write down notes as an intuitive way to relay the food experience and assemble the destination foodscapes for readers, thus becoming a bridge for cross-cultural understandings and providing e-WOM (e-word of mouth) to the public ^[11][18].

2. Foodscape: A Brief Review

We live in a world surrounded by food and meals. The concept of foodscape describes this complex social system where humans interact with the foodstuff and place through various practices ^[1][7][12][7,14,19]. It is composed of “food” and the suffix “-scape”, which shows an advantage in studying the food-related phenomena that are unevenly distributed in space and contexts ^[13][20]. Hall and Gössling emphasized that foodscape is a dynamic concept as it reveals a changing picture of how food is embedded and connected with the exterior physical, social, perspectival and cultural surroundings ^[14][21]. According to different geographical scales, the foodscape ranges from the microscopic (e.g., body, kitchen) to the meso level (e.g., community, region) and the macro level (e.g., nation) ^[15][3]. After around 20 years of knowledge accumulation, the current foodscape studies can be generally divided into three primary research directions. First is foodscape in the sphere of nutrition and public health studies. This direction aims to promote more nutrition-friendly foodscapes and improve public health ^{[16][17][18][19]}[22,23,24,25]. Second is the construction of ethical, equitable and sustainable foodscapes, mainly in the spheres of politics, geography and sociology ^{[20][21][22][23][24][25]}[26,27,28,29,30,31]. The third is the foodscape consumption and experience, mainly in the consumer behavior and culture sphere ^{[26][27][28][29][30]}[2,32,33,34,35]. The three directions of foodscape studies overlap with different academic emphases. A consensus exists that this concept is useful for approaching a holistic and relational understanding of the complex network composed of humans, food materials, the environment and culture ^[12][31][32][6,8,19]. Specifically, in the third direction of foodscape consumption and experience, culture is highlighted as a significant and dynamic variable in influencing consumers’ experience and the construction of foodscapes ^[15][32][3,8]. Unlike the habitual daily life that is paid attention to by the majority of studies, tourism provides a cross-cultural context where destination food acts simultaneously as a tourism attraction and a supporting necessity for tourists ^[4][5][11,12]. In this sense, the destination foodscape can be seen as an interactive and co-created landscape among tourists, food and destination places. Then, how do pweople conceptualize the destination foodscape considering the unique cultural encounters tourism creates? What are its connections with tourists’ food experiences? The answers to these questions are quite important as they provide a rethinking of the conceptualizations of foodscape and food consumption hern in current literature. However, they are relatively ignored by current scholars.

3. Foodscape in Tourism: A Mixed Landscape

The most crucial distinction of destination foodscape from those in daily contexts is its mixed feature in the cross-cultural interface tourism brings. On the one hand, tourists leave their homes to seek an exceptional destination landscape. Foods become one of the core attractions to mark the destination’s uniqueness and create memorable experiences ^[33][34][35][36,37,38]. Tourists seek novelty not only from tasting the food and learning about the ingredients but also from the embodied experience of the tangible and intangible dining environment, the identity and interactions with the service staff, other guests and locals ^[28][36][37][33,39,40]. On the other hand, tourists also need food to satisfy their hunger needs and replenish themselves ^[6][38][13,41]. In this sense, eating becomes a habitual and supporting activity ^[3][10]. Tourists seek familiarity, comfort, and ontological security from the destination food and the related places to deal with possible physical and psychological maladjustment ^[39][42]. For example, previous studies have found that when Chinese tourists visit Europe, even though the taste and environment are not that authentic, they would more or less choose the local Chinese restaurant because of their discomfort with the local food and eating habits ^{[4][5][6][40]}[11,12,13,43]. Hence, pushed by these two opposite motives, tourists with different novelty tolerance would search for different destination foods and dining environments. In this process, tourists connect different destination materials and social-cultural actors, and various types of foodscapes are being produced. The destination foodscapes can thus be seen as a kind of mixed landscape hybridized with local and global, indigenous and alien, traditional and modern, and host and guest cultures. Current tourism studies mainly proposed four models to describe tourists’ food choices in destination, which provide a useful line of thought to frame the different types of destination foodscapes. The novelty-familiarity binary structure ^[3][38][10,41], the core-periphery structure ^[2][9], the novelty-familiarity spectrum model ^[6][8][13,15], and the two-dimensional matrix model ^[7][14]. The novelty-familiarity spectrum model is developed based on the binary and core-periphery structure to argue for more mixability and in-betweenness of tourists’ food consumption and experiences. Lin et al. summarized four types of destination foods: a destination’s local food, overseas Chinese food, global fast food, and tourists’ home food ^[6][13]. It deserves further consideration of the embeddedness of these foods in the destination context and their possible assemblages of foodscapes. The two-dimensional matrix model proposed by Björk and Kauppinen-Räisänen is mainly based on the dimensions of the organized/unorganized environment and the stage for tourists/locals ^[7][14]. Based on it, they summarized four types of destination foodscapes: destination service encounter, local service encounter, destination encounter, and local encounter. However, this model relatively ignores the dimension of culture in tourism encounters. As a holistic and abstract concept, the inner dimensions and connotations of destination foodscape also need more research attention. Currently, Björk and Kauppinen-Räisänen have summarized five dimensions: physical environment, social interactions, food quality value, monetary value, and divergence ^[7][14]. The physical environment includes the physical location, the décor, the functionality, and the service encounter’s story. Social interactions include the interactions with (or the immersions among) the service staff, the guests and the family members. Food quality values include food sensation and food locality. Monetary value refers to the price–quality relationship. Divergence refers to the difference or special happenings. The independent dimension of “divergence” indicates an emphasis on the exceptional and novel features of tourists’ food experience, ignoring the novelty-familiarity mixed feature that tourists may obtain from the other four dimensions. In addition, as this construct is mainly referred to from the servicescape perspective, the element of culture in the connotation of destination foodscape lacks full consideration.

4. Posting Travelogs: Assembling Destination Foodscape Online

As tourists use online blogs and social media to plan and record their travel experiences globally, a vast virtual community emerges ^[10][41][42][17,44,45]. Tourists use their accounts of online tourism agencies or various social media apps to post their travelogues in texts, photographs and videos. As food opens a wonderful journey of visual, taste and emotional senses and fixes a deep memory of the destination place, the food experience is frequently recorded by tourists and receives a large audience ^[9][16]. In this virtual community, tourists with pseudonyms have high freedom to express and present what they see, think and feel with the destination food ^[43][44][46,47]. As there is no clear target to satisfy a specific audience, tourists can flexibly entertain themselves by presenting fragrant and colorful dining images, with the texts narrating their authentic experiences ^[45][48]. Hence, in a travelogue, the tourist’s narration of their on-site experience connects a relational network of the destination food, the physical environment and ambiance, the service and human interaction as a way to perform the destination foodscape. Hence, compared with real society, the virtual community of online travelogues provides a secondary world for tourists to record and assemble the destination foodscape, providing a rich database to research how different destination foodscapes are performed through the perspective of the tourist food experience. However, it is still ignored in the tourism literesearchature, just as Okumus has argued that more scholarly attention should be paid to the technology and media and their connections with food experiences and culinary destinations ^[46][49].