Animals, Food and Tourism

Food is routinely given attention in tourism research as a motivator of travel. Regardless of whether tourists travel with a primary motivation for experiencing local food, eating is required during their trip.

This book provides an interdisciplinary discussion of animals as a source of food within the context of tourism. Themes include the raising, harvesting, and processing of farm animals for food; considerations in marketing animals as food; and the link between consuming animals and current environmental concerns. Ethical issues are addressed in social, economic, environmental, and political terms. Chapters are theoretically grounded in frameworks of ethical theory, critical theory, ecofeminism, environmental theory, political economy, cultural theory, and the Global Sustainable Tourism Criteria. Several chapters explore contradicting and paradoxical ethical perspectives, whether those contradictions exist between government and private sector, between tourism and other industries, or whether they lie within ourselves.

This book wrestles with a range of issues such as animal sentience, the environmental consequences of animals as food, viewing animals solely as a extractive resource for human will, as well as the artificial cultural distortion of animals as food for tourism marketing purposes. It will appeal to tourism academics and graduate students as a reference for their own research or as supplementary material for courses focused on ethics within tourism.

Carol Kline is an Associate Professor of Hospitality and Tourism Management at Appalachian State University in the Department of Management. Her research interests focus broadly on tourism planning and development and tourism sustainability, but cover a range of topics such as foodie segmentation, craft beverages, agritourism, wildlife-based tourism, animal ethics in tourism, tourism entrepreneurship, niche tourism markets, and tourism impacts to communities.