Culinary tourism. Not a phrase you hear everyday. But for three days next week, Halifax is set to become a mecca for all things culinary tourism. The inaugural One World, One Table – Culinary Tourism Summit begins Sunday with over 150 food- industry folk dropping in from across the globe—here to learn how culinary tourism can bolster the economy.Â
“It’s going to be a great event,” says Erik Wolf, president of the International Culinary Tourism Association and a presenter of the summit. “Halifax is a great culinary destination.”
Not everyone is travelling to shop, play golf or go to the ballet, but everyone eats—a fact upon which the culinary tourism movement was founded.
Besides, the notion of culinary tourism is definitely not exclusive to people from away.
“You’re still a visitor on the other side of town,” says Wolf.
Highlights of the conference include a talk by Food Inc. producer Robert Kenner on social responsibility to support local agriculture and cuisine and a keynote speech from famed Food Network chef Michael Smith.
(Tickets for this Monday morning talk are on sale for $30 to non-conference goers.)
“The conference deals a lot with fresh, local, organic, seasonal and sustainable,” says Wolf, who coined the term culinary tourism and has since become the go-to on all things to do with culinary travel.
“I’ll be talking about how the world has changed since the last great depression, giving some good news and prognosis for the next 10 years.”
The summit features more than 20 other sessions on topics ranging from the future of local and independent restaurants to social media marketing for culinary tourism professionals. Delegates are also invited to take part in two mobile workshops at an extra cost of $95 per session.
The first, at L’Acadie Vineyards, takes delegates on a tour of the vineyard, with tastings and appetizer pairings. Also included are a chat about cool-climate grape growing and winemaking in the province.Â
At the second, at Fox Hill Cheese House, delegates can see how this sixth-generation family farm produces their cheese from grain to milk to consumers—including a look at their business practices.
Back at the convention centre, there will be food.Â
“We’ve taken a lot of care in crafting menus that use as much local Nova Scotia product as possible,” says Wolf.
“You don’t get boring conference food with us.” But despite his efforts to feature local coffee from Just Us at the conference, Trade Centre Limited has yet to agree to replace their regular coffee supplier for those three days.
At the outset, conference organizers aimed to attract more than 300 people to the city, but in the end, only half will make it.
“Trying to get 300 delegates into Halifax is just too expensive,” he says. “People want the information. They don’t want all the frills.”Â
Next year, Wolf and the ICTA will begin a world tour to counter that problem. Visiting 10 cities annually, Wolf hopes to reach out to a broader community and drastically reduce the gross carbon footprint incurred by such conferences.
The summit runs from September 19-21 at the World Trade and Convention Centre. Check out culinarytourismworldsummit.com for more information.
This article appears in Sep 16-22, 2010.
they’ll be plenty of donairs and haddock 🙂
any bio chemistry palate testing
Eating local is so over-rated and such a product of our yuppy/hipster/hippy classes of people who unfortunately seem to be an evergrowing breed in Halifax. Thank God Edmonton is still a no-shit taking tell it how it is working town, where these types of people are thankfully in the minority and generally frowned upon. But I digress…
First of all, what are we going to do without all the great fruits and veggies that we can’t grow in Canada, especially over the winter? Kind of hard to grow bananas, mangoes, or pineapples in Nova Scotia.
Secondly (this is where it gets a bit trickier with some economic understanding involved): it can actually be more efficient, and therefore more environmentally sustainable, to focus on growing a lot of one single crop in a few areas and ship it en masse than smaller amounts of food grown in more places being shipped in smaller amounts. Ever wonder why stuff is so cheap at the BULK Barn?
For example:
Mega Foods Inc. (MFI) can produce 2,000,000 potatoes in Idaho per month, while Local Farmer Joe MacDonald (LFJM) in the Valley can only produce 100,000 per month. This means MFI can buy fertilizer etc., grow, and ship in bulk, while LFJM can’t. While MFI needs, say, 20,000 kilos of fertilizer for its 2,000,000 potatoes with its larger, more efficient farm, equalling 100 potatoes per kilo of fertilizer, LFJM might need 5,000 kilos of fertilizer, equalling only 20 potatoes per kilo.
Secondly, while MFI would produce, say, 200 tonnes of CO2 emissions through trains and trucks shipping their 2,000,000 potatoes from the big bad USA, equalling 10,000 potatoes per tonne of CO2 emission, LFJM might produce, say, 50 tonnes, equalling only 2,000 potatoes per tonne.
Basically, 90% of the time, efficiency = sustainability. You may feel good about yourself growing some scrawny carrots and crappy little tomatoes in your little hippy community garden thinking you’re helping to save the world from evil capitalists, but you’re really not doing anything to help the environment, or our tastebuds. No wonder most hipsters are so skinny, haha.
Price determines my purchase. I couldn’t care less where the food comes from. If it takes good, I eat it.
Efficiency can hardly be equated with sustainability. “Efficiency” is an inert concept until you–impliedly or expressly–preface it with the process you’d like to gauge, such as “short-term cost-efficiency”, thermal-efficiency, space-efficiency etc.
For 10 years, it might be wonderfully cost-efficient to clear the Amazon and raise beef for export around the world. Hell, maybe it’ll even be cheaper than Alberta beef! (We’ll see who’s deriding the “buy local” movement then. . . .) After 10 years that thin top soil will have become depleted and the only option that’ll allow the scale of export that’s become the norm will be to slash and burn more forest for more short-lived pastures. (Adopting modern farming techniques to revive the “used land” would raise the cost, shrink the export market, and wouldn’t be “efficient”.)
No doubt some large scale mono-culture type agriculture is both cost-efficient and co2-efficient, especially when compared to someone using the same commercial techniques on a smaller scale and trucking their produce into the city each week. Looking at both from the perspective of sustainability requires far more: your MFI operation will require increasing pesticide use to combat increasingly resistant pests that thrive in an endless horizon of their favourite food, and an irrigation system that (perhaps) cannot be indefinitely supported by the local aquifer (as is the plight of many in the Mid-western States).
With only the introduction of a more carbon/energy-efficient form of transportation–and/or relocation closer to the market place combined with a move away from mono-culture to facilitate a move to less or no chemical application, the small scale operation in the Valley becomes vastly more sustainable. It’s up to consumers to vote with their dollars as to which paradigm they’d like to prevail. All things considered, the buy-local movement is just an application of common sense and foresight. No one is suggesting giving up all that cannot be grown locally, only supporting that which can.