Transformations of the backpacking food tourist: emotions and conflicts

This article focuses on sensations relating to food, consumption and digestion, and will specifically seek to address the conflicting emotions surrounding food, tastes and eating practices while embarking on a backpacking journey. There has been a growing interest in food tourism within the social sciences, exploring the significance of food and drink to the tourist experience. However, there is little focus on the heightened and often problematic emotions associated with food and eating for backpackers who are travelling independently for an extended period of time. Drawing on fieldwork data that explored the emotional and embodied experiences of women travellers, I will describe some of the strong emotions determined by the everyday practice of consumption while moving through different travelling spaces. Moreover, this article will discuss the temporal context of the production of emotions around food. Mealtimes often provide structure and rhythm to backpacker’s everyday lives ‘on the road’, but their emotional responses to food also follow a process of change over an extended period of time. I will argue that the realm of the backpacking journey intensifies both positive and negative emotions relating to food and consumption, and discuss how this fits into wider theories of embodiment and temporality in backpacking tourism