Ever heard of food travel or food tourism? It is one of the best ways to discover new places and experience a native culture. Food plays an important role of culture that expresses a form of cultural identity. Today, thanks to the technology, food had become the most photographed subject on the network. Everyone is taking pictures of their delicious food and share on the social media, especially when traveling.
Recently, more and more people consider food as a deciding factor when choosing a new place to visit. Not only do they eat the local food, but they also bring food back to home as souvenirs.
Why is food an important part of travel? When you taste new foods, the act provides you a full range of experiences, first you smell the scent, then you see its colors and shape, finally when you eating the food, at the same time, you watch the views and sounds of surroundings, all the senses together will create a unique experience that becomes a memory that you cannot easily forget. When you are long gone, the taste and smell of food will always bring you back to the moment when you’re traveling.
Believe it or not, food is a very powerful way to experience a new culture. You can tell so much about a country by just eating its national food, and understand the way people live in the country by the way they eat. Try to step out your comfort zone, and taste as many local foods as possible, no matter it’s a bowl in ramen shop or jerk chicken on the roadside stand. If you always think about save money on food while traveling, or avoid street foods due to fear of sickness. Then you may have missed a lot of amazing things.
Not all national food taste good, but they are significant in some way. To name a few of them: The Hainanese chicken rice in Singapore seems simple enough, but if you take a mouthful of it, you will understand what all the fuss is about; The Falafel in Israel (or Palestine, Eghpt, Lebanon) is a mix of ground chickpeas and onion, deep-fried and then served with hummus, which is outrageously delicious; The Har gow in Hong Kong is the iconic dish in dim sum. Prawn meat wrapped in a thin skin that has to be done perfectly, and the result is delicate and delicious.
There’s more to the list, but it’s impossible to list all of them. However, you can take this FOOD QUIZ and explore all the national dishes and street foods we have collected, let’s see how many local foods have you tried, and can you recognize all of them?
