According to a recent study, 27 million Americans "have recently taken a food tour, enrolled in a cooking class, toured a winery or otherwise participated in culinary activities as part of a vacation" in the last three years. That's still only one out of every six leisure travellers, but the numbers are growing. "The interest in culinary tourism has accompanied a rise in emphasis on food throughout American culture, said Barry Glassner, a sociology professor at the University of Southern California and author of the book "Gospel of Food," published last month. "We define ourselves by how we eat. We show others and we show ourselves what kind of people we are by how adventurous we are about food," he...
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If you enjoyed Austin Bush's post on how to eat Thai food that I linked to a few days ago, you'll probably also like his new post on how to read and pronounce a Thai menu: "Thai is a picky language, and a misdirected tone, a shortened vowel or improperly articulated consonant can mean the difference between a hot meal and yet another bag of "Thai Basil" chips at 7-11. And not only are Thai words hard to pronounce, but,there is no commonly accepted method of transliteration from Thai to English, so a dish you saw spelled one way on a menu last week, could very well be spelled differently in the next place. To help you understand and make...
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Santos of the Scent of Green Bananas is putting together a list of Asian women who've got food blogs—the number is at 328 and counting! Our Alaina Browne made the graph you see above to better visually represent which countries the bloggers are in—you can see a larger version to make better sense of it. So far the US has almost a third of all bloggers listed; the other countries that round out the top five are Singapore, Japan, Australia and the Philippines....
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"Eating Thai food with non-Thais always reminds me how different our eating habits are. Although you're probably not going to offend anybody by holding your spoon the wrong way or taking to much yam wun sen, understanding how Thai people eat will undoubtedly smooth your way and maybe even provide a greater understanding of the food and people. And chicks love it. So here are a few tips on how to eat like the Thais do." Austin Bush lives in Bangkok, so he should know. Tips one through three transfer exactly to most other Asian cuisines that I can think of, so it's well worth a read even if Thai food isn't your favorite....
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