Food Recipe Essay -- Nutrition, Traditional Food

This chapter first enlightens definition of traditional food. Many researchers in previous studies define traditional food in many ways of thoughts. Generally, traditional food is connected with locality, whether from its ingredients, method, formulation or people who handle it. As well, some researchers address traditional food has a strong relationship with cultural and heritage of the place whereby it is produced. In addition, authenticity is an important element that contributes to the uniqueness of traditional food. As traditional food embraces culture and heritage instead of relating to authenticity hence it gives a lot of advantages to tourism industry within the country. Terengganu is chosen as a state within Malaysia, which represents the variety traditional foods that contain the elements of authenticity. Lastly, explanations about traditional food, authenticity, relationship between food and tourism along with Terengganu as an authentic food representative in Malaysia will be discussed a detail in this chapter. 2.2 Definition of Traditional Food Food is commonly acknowledged as something that contains nutritional values which beneficial to human health. On the other hand, Bassiere (1998) defined food as a component of physio-logical, psycho-sensorial, social, hygienic, and symbolic environment. The author symbolized food in different guises whereby as: (a) basis of fantasy and symbolic virtues (bread, wine and dark blood of the game); (b) communication (food sharing influence social link), class marker (champagne, wine, caviar or tripe); and (c) emblem of culinary heritage. In terms of traditional food, Iglesias et al. (2003) defined it as food which is fully elaborated from traditional ways of processing or ... ...s a strong relationship between local food and tourism as today culinary tourism has become wider and popular almost in all countries. Chen-Tsang and Jeou-Shyan (2011) commented food might be just a part of economy but marketing of food which collaborate restaurants, markets and products is the essential component of tourism. Similarly, Gustafsson et al. (2005) revealed that regional food culture is an advantage to the economy as it seems to spawn successful rural food businesses. Therefore, producers, marketers even government need to have a great effort to examine the existing culinary resources so that any potential benefits could be identified. Sound framework which taken in consideration pros and cons should be established to ensure tactical form and style of culinary tourism appropriates for certain place could be developed (Chen-Tsang and Jeou-Shyan, 2011).