As people in developed countries
increasingly gain weight, the ‘ideal’ body shape is getting thinner, exerting pressure
on people to lose weight. This pressure is particularly strong for women,
exposed to the gaze of their partners and friends, and continually measured
against the ‘ideal woman’ as portrayed in the media. The surveillant gaze may
become even more crucial on holiday, as bare flesh is exposed to the view of
strangers on the beach. As Valentine (1999) argues, we are caught between such
discourses of self-control in relation to food, and the pleasurable, hedonistic and
social aspects of eating, which are also related to identity, bodily pleasures and
sexual desire.
Food is also one of the important aspects of the ‘environmental bubble’ that
surrounds most tourists on their travels. Many tourists eat the same food on
4 Greg Richards
holiday as they would do at home. Mass tourist resorts can often be divided
spatially on the basis of cuisine – English tourists in English pubs, German tourists
in the Bierkeller. Some tourists still engage in the habit of taking their own food
with them on holiday. Dutch tourists are still renowned for this, even to the extent
of taking their own potatoes with them when they go camping in Southern
Europe.
Food has been used as a means of forging and supporting identities, principally
because what we eat and the way we eat are such basic aspects of our culture. As
Leigh points out, eating habits are parochial behaviours that are learned and
culturally bound:
Some Catholics still avoid meat on Friday, as an act of contrition, and so
often eat fish on this day. Japanese love raw fish. Chinese eat dogs and monkeys.