Food plays a crucial role in tourism, but unfortunately, many tourism models prioritize visitor satisfaction at the expense of wasteful tendencies. Around 931 million tons of food is wasted annually, which seriously impacts global food security. This chapter aims to analyze the literature concerning the relation between food security and tourism, with particular attention to food wastage in the hospitality and restaurant industries. The findings show how tourism can contribute to enhancing destination food security and highlight the role of food wastage in the hotel industry and its effects on food security. The chapter also outlines various strategies that have been proposed to reduce food wastage in hotels based on existing literature.
TopIntroduction
The phenomenon of tourism has become an essential activity ingrained in the life of contemporary societies. Therefore, travel and related activities constitute a series of experiences in the consumer's everyday life (Andersson & Mossberg, 2016). Hence, tourism massification is aligned with consumer trends. During the mid-20th century's era of salaried societies, tourism evolved into a marker of social distinction. The support for this transformation came from governmental institutions and international organizations that advocated for tourism as a crucial element in the development of marginalized regions. However, this promotion tended to overemphasize the merits of the 'industry without smokestacks', such as currency acquisition, job creation, investment attraction, and societal modernization, among others. This strategy resulted in several negative outcomes, including the displacement of indigenous communities, standardization of labor practices, shifts in economic activities, reliance on global powers regulating tourist flows, and the emergence of “packaged cultures”, among other repercussions (Barbini et al., 2012).
The emergence of sun-and-beach tourism in the 1990s led to a restructuring of tourist consumption, diversifying the reasons for travel (Contreras & Medina, 2021). This shift resulted in certain destinations evolving into well-defined market niches (Guzmán et al., 2009). Subsequently, an industrialized tourism model emerged, targeting affluent international travelers seeking leisure and relaxation through standardized high-quality services. These tourism advancements involved physical alterations to spaces, optimization of air travel, and construction of hotel complexes, golf courses, marinas, efficient airports, shopping centers, theme parks, and extensive regional infrastructures, among other developments. These changes facilitated the territorial occupation by major transnational corporations (Vargas, 2015).
The proliferation of large-scale tourist projects surged due to the insatiable demand from tourists. Natural resources became easy targets for major hotel chains and their expansion plans, transforming the sun-and-beach tourism product into an 'all-inclusive' model to meet the substantial demand for mass consumption in tourism (Vargas, 2015).
The food and beverage service industry holds a prominent position within the tourism sector (Fennell & Bowyer, 2019; Sujood et al., 2024). Under an unlimited production and distribution system, consumption in the hotel industry is highly vulnerable to food wastage (Huang, 2019). Data indicate that kitchen waste in a hotel constitutes approximately 40% of the total waste production of the establishment (Pham et al., 2018).
In this regard, food waste is one of the most important sources of environmental pollution in the tourism sector, with significant impacts on natural resources (Food and Agriculture Organization [FAO], 2013). This trend has sparked debate among academics and scientists, who argue that, if it persists, it could lead to significant changes in the access, availability, use, and stability of food resources (Degarege & Lovelock, 2021).
In this context, food consumption and subsequent wastage emerge as critical issues (Fennell & Bowyer, 2019) that require attention from sectors engaged in food production and distribution. The tourism sector has experienced revitalization following the COVID-19 pandemic, shedding light on its generated impacts, including issues like food insecurity (Dhir et al., 2020; Wang et al., 2017).
The issue of food wastage is a matter of global concern, prompting the FAO (2013) to conduct many studies analyzing the environmental critical points within the food chain. These studies have proposed actions across various fronts to mitigate wastage. However, the association between tourism and food security due to increased food consumption and subsequent wastage has received limited attention. Hence, researchers, academics, and other scholars in the field of tourism are encouraged to contemplate the relationship between this activity and food security. Specifically, they should consider the role played by the hotel industry in food wastage, aiming to progress toward a more sustainable consumption model.