Overview
The essence of culinary tourism is the preservation of your local food culture. Most of the world has culinary traditions worthy of preserving. The traditions may include recipes, cooking methods, utensils, dining customs, preparation customs, specific ingredients, and so on.
If you do not work to help preserve your local food culture, then in 20 years you will no longer have any choices. Left in the world will be 2 choices for hamburgers, 2 choices for cola, 2 choices for bottled water, and 2 choices for Italian food. Large corporations will make the decisions for you.
Click on the tabs for suggestions of things you can do to help preserve your local food culture.
Accreditation
Seven Spoons is the evolution of culinary accreditation for businesses and destinations.
If your area has businesses worth drawing attention to, consider certifying them under our Seven Spoons Business Accreditation. The criteria for the program are solid and really prove that a business is a unique experience. The program is much, much more than a simple rating or consumer reviews. Ratings and reviews comprise only 1 of the 7 pillars, or spoons, that generate the rating for the business or destination.
Small Change
Smaller, independent businesses and programs need help to survive. Sometimes a more prominent entity like the International Culinary Tourism Association needs to step in and formally offer support in front of naysaying government officials or media.When you support Small Change for Small Business, you give worthy programs a chance to succeed. By supporting the program, you will be able to nominate worthy programs of your choice. You can follow the progress of the program through our press releases and twitter feeds. Give now on your favorite site: we currently work with Crowdrise and Snoball.
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PROJECT OVERVIEW
Chains (restaurants, hotels, etc.) and global corporations (think: burgers and coffee) are the death knell for small businesses - which are crucial to the survival of our communities. Without our help, cash flows out of a community to the corporate headquarters and the community dies. We want to do something about that and we need your help. We've just created our "Small Change for Small Business” program to help preserve local culinary cultures and save communities. Preservation of culinary culture is a major focus of our Institute’s programming.
WHAT'S A "LOCAL CULINARY CULTURE"?
It's whatever makes the food and drink in your area unique and worth trying, preserving and promoting. For example, BBQ in the Southeast of the USA, whisky in Scotland, hot sauces in Trinidad, cooking classes in Thailand, etc. These products are part of the culinary cultures of these regions. They are things that you would sorely miss if the culinary experience was standardized by a big corporation. Quality would suffer, cash would leave the community and the local culture - especially culinary culture - would become more homogenized and global. We don't want that.
WHAT ARE WE DOING TO FIX THE PROBLEM?
We're polling our members right now and are exploring projects worthy of focus. One suggestion has been to fight draconian foodcart laws across the USA. Another suggestion has been to help develop a culinary trail in New Zealand. Still a third suggestion is to provide small businesses with a program to educate and support their effort to compete effectively with big chains. A fourth suggestion has been a sustained public relations campaign to awaken the public to the need to support local. And finally, another suggestion is to start an investment fund to help underemployed entrepreneurs in a developing area enter into the foodservice business. These are great ideas but they require funding. We're open to anything reasonable but we require that the project already has some momentum -it just needs a bit of extra help. We also cannot support private businesses directly, we're sorry. The project will benefit from a formal strategic partnership with our organization.
WHAT'S OUR TIMEFRAME?
As soon as funding goals are me, we will be free to choose a project. We will publicize the project we choose.
WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?
Every little bit helps.
Slow Food
Slow Food is an international organization headquartered in Italy. It has a world-wide network of convivia (like chapters or groups) that work at the grassroots level to help support the preservation of local food cultures. Their Ark of Taste is one such program. Join Slow Food today and see how you can help make a difference.