Food tourism policy: deconstructing boundaries of taste and class

Recent discussions from the journal of Tourism Management call for more critical deconstructions of the political and economic structures that shape policy and planning. This paper takes up this call, utilising a post-structualist framework to examine Scotland’s food tourism landscape. Utilising Foucauldian discourse analysis to deconstruct 2,251 media sources collected through a Factiva database search, we illustrate the ways policy discourses privilege the cultural symbols of the middle class through official food tourism promotion, marginalising particular foods positioned as working class. We find that this is particularly evident through the example of the deep fried Mars bar; where, despite touristic desires, through classed media discourses it becomes constructed as global, bad and disgusting, and therefore an embarrassment to official tourism bodies. We conclude by discussing the broader importance of attending to the marginalising and silencing effects tourism policy exerts if the power values and interests involved in its formation are not critically appraised.