The rise of lifestyle food, wine and cooking content across all media from print to Internet reinforces the importance of `foodies' as a global audience. Foodies have a high interest in good food and fine dining and they usually tend to spend more on a good bottle of wine, when compared with others who are only interested in food for sustaining. This global audience thrives on a strong interest in food culture comprising taste, aroma, texture, place, people and the conversations that take place over sharing food with others. Foodies are most likely to travel to achieve a great dining experience. This suggests why so many of the world's top restaurants now use their website to promote degustation (or tasting) menus with as many as 5 to 17 courses. Along with the quality food of the tasting menus, foodies anywhere appreciate fancy wine. They thrive on regional or country information regarding food and wine which helps them understand the interrelationship with food culture.
Since, 300,000 BC (Middle Paleolithic age), mankind has been telling stories over campfires about food, even when it was no more than burnt untreated food. Today, these stories are told on the Internet in blogs, helping preserve the local food cultures and making them readily accessible on a global basis. There is a truism in the saying that `we are what we eat', so self reports on the web about food interests help to create individual identity and voice. One has only to look at a random selection of food blogs to see this. Examples can be given of Banana Tikka Masala (bananaasian.blogspot.com), which has write-ups on food by a Malaysian-born, New Zealand-raised, Australia-identifying and now UK-based, Chinese; Chocolate and Zucchini (chocolateandzucchini.com) authored by 26-year old Clotilde living in Paris that focuses on healthy eating and chocolates; Mahanandi (www.nandyala.org/mahanandi/) which provides a blogger with variations of Indian dishes; and chez pim (chezpim.typepad.com/blogs/) by a Thai living in San Francisco who provides commentaries as well as photographs of diners, street food, and takeaways of her eating and cooking adventures in London and Paris.
In addition to dedicated sites for foodies, travel blogs are also a useful source of knowledge on food culture. When people travel, they experience many new things including foreign cultures and food, which are highlighted in their visual recollection of journeys, as hosted on photoblogs. Pinton, an American in her mid-20s, is an independent traveler, who blogs her visual travel experience (www.travelblogs.org/Blogger/Cristina). Pinton's first entry was on July 28, 2004, and her last entry was on July 1, 2005. Pinton openly describes herself on the front page of her travel weblog as, "An artist, teacher and a dreamer to live out a dream in Italy. One of the many on a road with lots of possibilities."
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