Before the twentieth century, it was the upper classes who could afford to travel to the few existing national parks. To reach Yosemite Valley in the 1860s, “it was necessary to take a boat from San Francisco to Stockton, followed by a sixteen-hour stagecoach ride to Coulterville, and finally a fifty-seven-mile, thirty-seven-hour trek by horse and pack mule into the valley” (Sax 1980, 5). In the 1870s, the best route to reach Yellowstone required
a steamboat up the Missouri River 400 miles to the Yellowstone River, up that another 360 miles to the mouth of the Bighorn, then another 60 miles up the Bighorn to Clarks’ Fork. At this point a coach would take travelers the last 72 miles to the park’s border.
(Zaslowsky and Watkins 1994, 18)
To cover the thousand or so miles from Bismarck, North Dakota, to Yellowstone, it took at least three weeks and cost $100 (Zaslowsky and Watkins 1994, 18), a princely sum at the time.
The train and the transcontinental railroad, developed in the US around the same time that the idea of creating national parks took hold, democratized and changed the character of travel. Passing through landscapes that they observed without otherwise engaging, travelers became tourists when riding the train. “To be a tourist meant to be divorced from the realities of any visited place, to re-create its essence in the context of the cultural baggage a traveler brought along” (Rothman 1998, 39). The capacity for reflective judgment that has come to serve today’s cosmopolitan travelers well was seeded by the Romantics, nurtured by the Victorians, and came of age on the trains. Writing of the Victorians, Feifer noted that “the more developed one’s sensitivity, the more one would want to linger over the landscape” (1985, 167). Although recreating in nature was long associated with aristocratic privilege (Meeker 1973, 4), transportation networks developed in the mid-nineteenth century would extend the privilege more widely. Similarly, the development of restaurant dining in the nineteenth century “made eating a form of entertainment and an object of conspicuous consumption as well as sustenance”
Trains allowed mass transit to the parks at least in theory, starting in 1901 when the Grand Canyon Railway rolled into the South Rim. No longer was the $15, eight-hour stagecoach ride from Flagstaff the only game in town—now, visitors could pay $3.95 for a much shorter train ride (History of the Train 2022). However, their ticket prices were still out of reach for most Americans. With the trains in play, simply going anywhere at all was no longer a marker of elite status; rather, where one went and what one did there provided a more important badge of distinction. One’s destination became socially significant, and working-class resorts were branded and disregarded as venues for low-rent mass tourism, “places of inferiority which stood for everything that dominant social groups held to be tasteless, common and vulgar”
The National Park Service (NPS) was created in 1916 to conserve majestic landscapes and to provide for their enjoyment by the public, a dual purpose that has struck many observers as oxymoronic, as tourist use may in fact compromise the natural attributes of place. Founding NPS Director Stephen Mather recognized the importance of park concessions to an enjoyable public experience, noting that “scenery is a hollow enjoyment to a tourist who sets out in the morning after an indigestible breakfast” (cited in National Park Service 2023). In fact, contrary to imagined “pure” conservation motives, the founding of the first US National Park, Yellowstone, in 1872 can be attributed to the influence of potential concessioners, executives from the Northern Pacific Railroad who anticipated a lucrative tourist trade.
Over the next century, the invention of the automobile, the development of the interstate highway system, and the increasing accessibility of air travel allowed a more-mobile-than-ever middle class to reach locations previously unthinkable for them. Tourism by car served audiences more interested in novelty, recreation, and experience than the cultural enlightenment promised in turn-of-the-twentieth-century park travels (Rothman 1998, 149; see also Runte 1987). For travelers of the 1920s, “travel was not designed to make them better, wiser, or more prepared; it merely restored them to their native condition, the way they had been before the rigors of urban civilized life wore them down” (Rothman 1998, 150). But the challenge to American values wrought by the advent of the Great Depression presented the parks with an opportunity to interpret, educate, and inspire, returning in some ways to the earlier Romantic impulse.
A growing national park system in the US, reached by newly available modes of transportation, became a site for personal expression for the striving professional and managerial middle class. But this did not please everyone. In the 1950s, members of the National Parks Association registered concern about the ways in which the public was using the parks. Paul Shepherd Jr. “bemoaned the commercialization and rapid pace of park visits, and felt that ‘a larger majority of visitors [were] unaware of the peculiar meaning … of the parks’” (Carr 2007, 54). The resurrection of the Romantic impulse promised to tame the threat of the damaging, novelty-mad American tourist, as a battle for the soul of the park traveler played out alongside the emergence of the era of the lifestyle, wherein “one expressed oneself more at leisure than at work; by one’s hobbies, one’s possessions, one’s tastes” (Feifer 1985, 224). Conservation-oriented wilderness sites, with limited tourist service infrastructure, are and were not fancy, but just exclusive enough to provide refuge from the tacky, the vulgar, the mass, and the inferior, even as tourism literally consumes the lands, threatening to deplete or exhaust that which makes the destination striking or significant.
As more people traveled, the mobility of the upper classes provided them with cultural capital that helped them to evaluate and distinguish between different environments and to register as important their impressions of which ones had value and which were to be despised (Urry 1995, 175). In the present day, Americans with high cultural capital tend to understand sophistication through cosmopolitan-ism, “as having had a chance to travel, to learn languages, to discover various culinary traditions, and, more generally, to widen one’s horizons—which goes along with the quest for self-actualization” (Lamont 1992, 107). Vacation destinations and the eating experiences that accompany them signal refinement in this context, making national parks fascinating sites for struggles of cosmopolitan self-making.
Getting to Cosmopolitanism
Since their founding, national parks have been places for introspection, communing with nature, experiencing the sublime, finding one’s authentic self, and also virtue-signaling. From the start, national parks were pitched toward those who could afford the time and substantial expense involved in traveling to remote
locations—those with capital, economic and cultural. Victor and Edith Turner asserted that “modern pilgrimages may be read as ‘meta-social commentaries’ on the troubles of the epoch and a search for vanishing virtues” (1978, 38). In the late 1800s, wealthy travelers made exhausting and expensive pilgrimages to the parks to escape the dirty and overcrowded industrial cities of the east. The romantic ethos of national parks prioritized leaving behind the mundanity of daily life, instead traveling widely to commune with nature, to experience solitude and awe-inspiring vistas, and thus to reflect and change one’s life for the better.
Perhaps not much has changed in the last 150 years since Yellowstone National Park was founded. Much as spas and springs served as resorts for the wealthy, for whom a medical motive for travel—taking the therapeutic waters—excused the traveler temporarily from the demands of the Protestant work ethic (Bartlett 1985), today’s national parks may also serve not only an aesthetic problem for visitors but also a moral one. In the overworked US, where 52% of workers left vacation days on the table in 2017 (US Travel Association 2018), we still frown to some extent on vacations. But there is redemptive value in communing with nature, hiking, or achieving spiritual rejuvenation in the outdoors, so the parks can solve a moral problem for visitors. National park travel allows the leisure of visitors to pass as a quest for health, thus making their recreation both socially acceptable and morally satisfactory (Bartlett 1985, 114). The food experiences in the parks bear some examination, then, as they do not always serve this mission well.
US national parks remain attractive to travelers who gain distinction through turning away from hyper-connected, media-saturated reality and rampant consumption of a never-ending supply of goods; these travelers instead seek “nature,” authenticity, and solitude as they travel slow, basking in the transformation offered by what has come to be known as the “experience economy.” Today, highly mobile travelers from affluent parts of the world travel far, “often to take largely inward journeys: to practice ‘simplicity’ and ‘slowness’ and experience ‘authenticity’” (Howard 2012, 12). But the global flows of information enabled by transportation networks and communication technologies mean that cosmopolitanism isn’t just something that rich people do; rather, it’s a cultural repertoire, available to many people across class and cultural boundaries.
Today, national parks are viable destinations for slow travel, which has emerged as a preferred status signifier. Slow travel exemplifies resistance to the artificial pleasures lamented by Olmsted, eschewing the fast, cheap, and out of control in favor of something quieter, smaller, and more special. Many elements of the parks lend themselves to slow travel, as their often-remote locations mean that they take time and effort to get to, and they’re off the grid, lacking televisions, strong Wi-Fi, and sometimes even cell service. Reservations are harder to get at many park lodges and campsites than the hottest new urban eatery, their elusiveness and exclusivity adding to their appeal. These features, along with their magnificent scenery, make park travel particularly appealing for tasteful travelers who have been cultivated to make distinctions and who enjoy communing with nature and slowing down, and reaping the social value of doing these activities. But these travelers find a food scene that is not generally as inspirational as the scenery. The food available in national parks has tended to emphasize neither culinary heritage, organic principles, nor the sensory embodiment of the journey, all cosmopolitan-friendly features of slow travel (Fullagar, Wilson, and Markwell 2012, 4), but this is changing, as cosmopolitan values have started to inflect the future of food in the parks.
The national parks are well set up for slow travel, as a great number of them are remote or not easy to get to. In most, there’s enough infrastructure that the traveler is never really required to “rough it,” but there’s enough distance from luxurious creature comforts (gourmet food, high thread-count sheets, light-speed Wi-Fi) that the travel itself reflects something importantly “alternative” about the traveler, enhancing their cultural capital (Munt 1994, 108). I’m particularly interested in the park food experiences of tastemakers and cultural intermediaries, for whom authentic experiences take precedence over experiences that require great amounts of economic capital (which they often do not have). Food is a way of communicating social identity, and through their cosmopolitan choices and attitudes, eaters can maintain distinctiveness from what they imagine as a parochial Other; however, they can also connect across differences.
Foodies are known to be anxious about consumerism and to find consumption morally freighted (de Solier 2013, 80). Educated foodies participate in cosmopolitan discourses when they imagine themselves as culturalisms—people who self-make through experiences and the cultivation of knowledge—rather than materialists, who accumulate things; and they particularly love food because they can enjoy material culture without the anxiety-producing accumulation it usually entails (de Solier 2013, 81). This attitude places certain pressures on food experiences during national park travel that the NPS, concessioners, and enterprising locals have been shifting toward providing.
Although a small number of people live and work in the national parks, for most people, time spent there is not everyday life. Because it’s vacation, there’s no cooking to be done, except perhaps for cooking while camping out, in which case the contextual limitations prevent real cooking. Fire bans in many of the parks and concerns about animal and camper safety have produced a situation in which camp cooking is often quite limited or outright nonexistent; thus, there is no showcase for the morally precious labor of food production. This situation puts more pressure on national park restaurants, which are then (inevitably) even more disappointing,
because they present so few opportunities for the kind of romantic consumption— that is, consumption that is “imaginative, remote from experience, visionary, and preferring grandeur or passion or irregular beauty” (Campbell 1987, 1)—that cosmopolitanism requires. The ethics and aesthetics of omnivorous cosmopolitans, which involve openness to the high and low, and to connecting across difference, but disregard for the facile – “easy, shallow, cheap, easily decoded and culturally undemanding” (Bourdieu 1984, 486)—are put to the test in the eating environments of national parks.
For those who can make the journey, parks offer limited opportunities for virtuous consumption alongside like-minded others. In the context in which “patterns of consumption and practices of the self such as eating and table manners mark class differences on to the body” (Bell and Valentine 1997, 23), eating and taste in national parks communicate about the status of the traveler. If everyone can go to the parks, how might one be set apart? As traditional markers of cultural legitimacy are shifting (Bellavance 2008, 190) and socioeconomic inequality rises in the late twentieth-century US, taste both reflects and shapes these inequalities; per Juliet Schor, “taste ceases to be a personally and socially innocent category” (1998, 29). The era of social media has made formerly invisible experiences like dining, leisure activities, and tourism effectively positional goods. Mass-produced goods have lost their ability to individuate and differentiate when everyone can buy them, but signature food experiences allow for a customized dimension that helps strivers keep up with upscale groups (Schor 1998, 76). Food, then, is important in national park travel. Food consumption in tourism is both essential and symbolic: “Since food also serves as a ‘social marker’ which identifies one’s group, social status is one of the pervasive factors affecting the types and quantity of foods eaten and the perceived meanings of foods”. Food is a positional good that facilitates social differentiation, connecting people to others who consume in similar ways (Urry 1995, 131). Eating in the parks provides, at least in principle, an opportunity for the kinds of reflection, interpretation, and openness that are central to cosmopolitan discourses, and which align handsomely with Olmsted’s emphasis on contemplative recreation in natural spaces.
What Is Cosmopolitanism?
Cosmopolitanism is a concept that has been embraced for its socially and political transformative potential (Rovisco and Nowicka 2011, 1). It’s not just an abstract concept but is grounded in empirical reality and material practices—in what people think and do. Research on cosmopolitanism interrogates “negotiations of difference via empathetic engagements with other cultures and value-systems, issues of self-transformation, and mobilities of various kinds” (Rovisco and Nowicka 2011, 2). My work is not trying to ask who are cosmopolitan visitors to national parks, how many of them are there, what is their racial/ethnic profile and socioeconomic status, and what are they eating, but rather invokes cosmopolitanism as an analytical tool: it allows me to investigate how cosmopolitanism inflects taste and foodways in the parks, thus shaping the experiences of a range of groups and individuals, one bite at a time.
Food choices and attitudes display wealth and social standing, and food tourism allows people to demonstrate individualism, affluence, and distinction (Harrington and Ottenbacher 2010, 19). Simultaneously a vehicle for expressing cultural identity and a simple form of sustenance, food “is an ideal vehicle for studying the meanings of cosmopolitanism in everyday life” (Cappeliez and Johnson 2013, 435). Cosmopolitanism is place-based, as it relates to consumption across real and symbolic cultural borders and boundaries. As I have traveled through US national parks, I have thought about how the people who visit these spaces have shaped the food system in the parks and how the food system has shaped local cultures and landscapes alike. I have also been struck by the emergence, however scattered and inchoate, of the kinds of authentic eating experiences sought by today’s romantic consumers—omnivorous citizens of the world eager to engage in global conversations, seeking mutual respect across differences (Appiah 2007)—into these highly industrialized food systems, and I’m heartened by the possibilities they present. How do the food experiences in national parks, otherwise ideal spaces for virtuous travel, constrain and provide opportunities for the expression of cosmopolitan identity? To answer this, I need to provide a framework for understanding what cosmopolitanism is and what it isn’t and educated members of the middle class, cosmopolitans, from this perspective, are known to be particularly interested in things like camping, hiking, yoga, and theatre- and museum-going as forms of recreation (Savage et al. 1992, 108).
Cosmopolitans are concerned with health and fitness, and these educated members of the professional and managerial middle class tend to be outdoorsy, enjoy spending time in nature, and often belong to environmental organizations (Urry 1995, 226). For health-focused cosmopolitans, the body and the environment can take on spiritual significance as parts of nature as a whole; in this context, the outdoors provides a site for healthy recreation and symbolizes society’s failure to nurture nature (Urry 1995, 226). According to Lamont, “vacation destinations and eating habits are used as signals of refinement” (1992, 107) for cosmopolitans, who define sophistication as being able to widen one’s horizons in a quest for self-actualization. Spaces dedicated to conservation and enjoyment, like national parks, then become particularly interesting spaces in which cosmopolitan body projects are carried out. Thus, industrialized park food is a pain point for privileged, highly mobile consumers.
This perspective on cosmopolitanism suggests that there are many motives for and expressions of cosmopolitan good taste, including wonder, curiosity, authenticity, distinction, trophy-taking, status, and national/cultural identity, and these motives play out in park tourism in interesting ways. In this view, highly mobile cosmopolitans, unbound by location, see in wilderness landscapes an opportunity to deploy their well-honed faculties for aesthetic judgment and appreciation. But the wonder and curiosity that cosmopolitans bring to these wild spaces are not innocent. “The production of wonder … is a calculated rhetorical strategy, the evocation of an aesthetic response in the service of a legitimate process” (Greenblatt 1991, 73–74). Cosmopolitan travelers, urged to “take only memories,” value experiences (and their representation via photographs) that create wonder and spur curiosity, not the trinkets, souvenirs, or postcards of the less sophisticated or foreign “trophy-taking” tourist (Machlis, Field, and Van Every 1984). The landscape itself is the object to be collected, endowing travelers with “the ownership of experience, and so with the experience of ownership” (Benedict 2002, 17–18).