Sustainable expedition and tasty meals : A design contradiction?

Abstract

This study focuses on meals on tourist expeditions from a sustainable and experience design perspective. There are studies on expedition food from a medical and nutrition point of view but without an experiential dimension. The purpose of this study is to explore how tour operators are offering meal experiences through sustainable practice during extraordinary expeditions. We report findings from dog sledding expeditions on Arctic Svalbard and Kilimanjaro Mountain climbing. We first describe how meal experiences are integrated into the expeditions. Second, we examine how this is done sustainably. Third, we investigate whether the meal experiences capacitate consumer immersion to enhance the total experience of the expeditions. Finally, we discuss how the study contributes to the debate on meal experience design for sustainable nature-based tourism. The tour operator in Kilimanjaro served nutritious and tasty local food, while the Svalbard trips were based on nutritious dry food during the trip with culinary dinner experiences. All expedition designs combined nutritious and tasty experiences, although differently. Although it is often difficult to focus on sustainability and culinary experiences in extraordinary contexts, we discuss how both aspects can be combined so that expedition food can enhance the experience of consumers.