From the get-go, national parks were conceptualized in conflicting ways with regard to access. Although the parks were touted as spaces for everyone, early proposals for a park bureau framed the parks as well-managed resorts—“recreational spaces and manipulated gardens overseen by guardians of taste and civility” (Taylor 2016, 330). Key figures associated with the early NPS, including Harold Bryant, Madison Grant, and Charles Goethe, were prominent eugenicists who supported restrictive immigration measures. Goethe in particular supported park naturalist programs, hoping that they would make people more aware of biological selection processes and thus more reflective on their own breeding practices, and thus likely to politically support strict immigration laws (Taylor 2016, 347). Preservationism and conservationism were intertwined with racist nativist and eugenicist discourse that reverberates still today in our understandings of whose souls the parks are meant to feed.
As Meeker pointed out nearly 50 years ago, the parks have not succeeded in appealing equally to all people: “Poor people, black people, and ethnic minorities generally show little enthusiasm for the park idea … The parks stubbornly remain essentially playgrounds for middle-class citizens” (Meeker 1973, 5). Indeed, visitation rates remain low for much of the US population, among particularly people of color and the socioeconomically marginalized (Weber and Sultana 2013). People who have been denigrated for their connections to the land might not just be
indifferent—they may be antagonistic to national parks and their self-making possibilities, better reserved for a white middle class striving toward cosmopolitanism. Some parks are easily accessible to US population centers, but a great many are remote, and require a good amount of free time and significant expense to reach (Bartlett 1985). Yet there exist important efforts to connect people of color with the parks, to ensure that the transformative personal experiences that public lands offer are not exclusive; this happens both by increasing accessibility measures within the parks and by raising awareness and spurring interest within communities of color (Peterman and Peterman 2009).
Presently, the food offerings in US national parks are mass oriented. As the analysis in the next section shows, there are glimmers of aspiration toward feeding a savvier, foodie-informed audience, but that is less so because of the promised revenue from this niche cosmopolitan market and more because the cosmopolitan niche exerts significant symbolic power on the mass market. Still, the concessions system is primarily oriented to scale, focused on feeding lots of visitors in the most efficient way possible that can generate revenue for the companies that operate the concessions. The federal government ensures, in the process of awarding concession contracts, that the prices are reasonable and that healthy offerings are in the mix. But in the big picture, food is not used in the parks to attract a more ethnically, racially, or internationally diverse crowd of visitors, and there is little allowance for religious or cultural difference.
Yellowstone and Xanterra: How to Eat in the Park and How to Be
US national parks are not known for the opportunities to eat that they provide, and the NPS does little to emphasize the park dining experience. However, food concessioners are eager storytellers, and many of the largest have become adept at using digital media to communicate about their role in the park foodscape. I am interested in how competing park mandates for preservation of natural spaces and enjoyment by the public are manifested and reconciled by concessioners in the stories they tell about themselves. There are dozens of concessioners operating hundreds of food venues in dozens of parks, so to say something generic about their storytelling is to miss the juiciness of the specific. Thus, I turn my attention in this chapter to a case study of how to eat in one park, the nation’s first and one of the most lucrative parks for concessions contracts, Yellowstone.
Hospitality companies, eager to attract visitors from across the US and beyond, rely on their websites and on digital marketing to reach their geographically dispersed audiences (George 2021). Many park visitors find their way to the hospitality companies that run park concessions through the park-specific websites of the NPS. Likely to the chagrin of these concessioners, restaurants do not occupy a particularly prominent place on the websites of any of the US national parks, which are designed in a standard fashion for ease of navigation. From the home page of any park, one needs to navigate to “Plan Your Visit,” then click “Eating and Sleeping.” Eating is never listed under “Things to Do,” as an important activity, like hiking, photographing, attending a ranger talk, or watching wildlife. Nor are the restaurants easily navigable from the prominently featured “Places to Go” page, which instead features the different areas of the park and then offers information about key landscape attractions, outdoorsy activities, and answers to frequently asked questions. From “Eating and Sleeping,” one chooses “Lodging, Camping, Picnicking or Restaurants” on the Yellowstone website.
The picnicking page features a rather unhappy looking group of white picnickers— possibly a family—sitting at a picnic table with the stately sandstone buildings of the Mammoth Hot Springs in the Fort Yellowstone Historic District visible in the back-ground. They have an open bag of potato chips, and one can make out a few plastic containers, mayo, and catsup. There are a few reusable water bottles, too. The text on the site is mostly informative, noting that there are several sites for picnicking in the park, but the chief message concerns safety: would-be picnickers are warned to refrain from feeding animals, to store food properly, and to use stoves and fire responsibly. There’s also a map of 52 picnic spots in the park, and a listing of the locations of over 300 picnic tables. There’s nothing about conviviality, authenticity, or solitude; as one would expect of the NPS, they’re not exactly “selling” the non-commodified picnic experience, but merely providing information. Lower on the page, one can click through to various concession-based eating and lodging experiences.
The “Restaurants” link on the Yellowstone site is a more robust portal that takes the reader to a comprehensive (yet unadorned by photos or even adjectives) listing of summertime dining options within the park’s boundaries, including fine-dining restaurants, cafeterias, snack bars and coffee counters, ice cream stands, and bars. Clicking any of the linked restaurants takes one outside of the NPS site to any number of pages run by Xanterra, one of the largest authorized concessioners in the NP sys-tem. (Although its general stores are listed on the restaurant page, there are no links provided to any of these enterprises run by Delaware North, a chief Xanterra competitor). Clicking through to the world of Xanterra means moving from the factual and straightforward information presentation of the NPS to a more engaging and persuasive space where opportunities abound for would-be eaters to imagine themselves.
The Xanterra Travel Collection runs concessions in Yellowstone, Grand Can-yon, Glacier, Zion, and Rocky Mountain National Parks, as well as at Mount Rush-more National Memorial. They operate the historic Oasis at Death Valley National Park, but on an inholding of private land, so they’re not an official concessioner there. Xanterra operates other park-adjacent concessions, including the Grand Can-yon Railway and Hotel and the Grand Hotel just outside the Grand Canyon, and Cedar Creek Lodge flanking Glacier National Park. Apart from the park system, they also operate Windstar Cruises, VBT Bicycling Vacations, Country Walkers, and Holiday Vacations. This portfolio, which allows them to post nearly a billion dollars annually in top-line revenue (Weissman, n.d.), indicates Xanterra’s aptitude at selling vacation dreams. Xanterra is owned by the massive, highly diversified Anschutz Corporation, an American private holding company that also owns oil fields, mines, arenas, stadiums, TV stations, newspapers, and sports teams. Today, Xanterra is descended from The Fred Harvey Company, which operated the first restaurant chain in the US in the 1870s. The Harvey Company was known for its choice restaurants and hotels situated alongside railways in the American South-west (Xanterra 2022d). Xanterra has the main concessions contract at Yellowstone until 2033, having won a 20-year term in 2013.
Xanterra makes about a third of its revenue from food and beverage operations (Blevins 2013, np) and is cited as one of the “most environmentally aware tourist operations in the country, with large-scale renewable energy projects and zero-waste goals” (Blevins 2013, np). Andrew Todd, CEO of Xanterra, describes his company’s environmental record as “unrivaled”—“We are definitely not into corporate greenwash” (cited in Blevins 2013). Xanterra’s operation at Yellowstone is a financial success, generating over $87 million in gross receipts in 2011 alone (Miller 2017).
Who one can be when one eats at a Xanterra property, according to Xanterra’s representational rhetoric, aligns with the founding rhetoric of the national parks, as discussed earlier, as well as the tenets of contemporary cosmopolitanism. Xanterra beckons to tourists with a taste for distinction:
For conscious travelers and explorers who want to satisfy their longing for enrichment, Xanterra Travel Collection provides intimate, immersive experiences around the world. Xanterra Travel Collection has been operating in legendary destinations for over 150 years, providing up close access and uncommon expertise for truly exclusive, unforgettable experiences, and we do so while treading carefully with a softer footprint and being mindful of our responsibility to others and to the earth.
(Xanterra 2022a) How these promises of enrichment, access, immersive experience, careful treading, and responsibility play out across Xanterra’s properties in Yellowstone is worth a close examination. After visiting dozens of their eateries and extensively reviewing their website, I can describe Xanterra’s food zeitgeist in five words that appear frequently throughout their narratives: fresh, local, house-made, customizable, and sustainable. As they are beholden to offer food at a variety of price points, I analyze how Xanterra’s storytelling about a basic eating venue, a higher-end, more expensive restaurant, and a specialty dining experience serves to reinforce ideas about romantic consumption and the character of the eater.