Tracing one dish across borders to understand migration and memory
Most people don’t book a trip because of the food, at least not on paper. They come for coastlines, castles and craft markets and even the cathedrals. And yet, when they talk about the trip after the fact, the stories often circle back to the table: the soup that tasted like grandma used to make or the unexpected dish they still think about months later. Food sneaks in as the supporting character and quietly steals the show.
That’s why, at Wheel & Anchor, food isn’t a side note to “fuel” a busy sightseeing program. It’s one of the main ways we enter a culture. A menu tells you things that guidebooks can’t: what’s abundant, what’s scarce, what’s considered “comforting,” and how people gather. A long lunch in a family-run trattoria will explain more about Italian priorities than any museum label ever could. Members tell us more often than anything else that the meals—where we eat, what we eat, and who we share it with—are what they remember most.
The myth of “native” dishes
Part of what makes food so fascinating is how deceptive it can be. We like to imagine certain dishes as rooted, immovable, as if they’ve always belonged to one place and one people. But scratch the surface, and you discover a story of migration, trade, empire, and adaptation.
Take pizza. In the popular imagination, it’s “purely” Italian, and more specifically Neapolitan. Yet tomatoes, without which modern pizza would be unthinkable, are native to the Americas and only arrived in Europe in the 16th century. For a long time, Europeans considered them ornamental or even poisonous. It took generations of experimentation before tomatoes migrated from curiosity to kitchen staple, transforming Italian cooking and eventually giving the world the Margherita.
Or consider goulash (gulyás), now shorthand for Hungarian comfort food. The dish traces back to herdsmen cooking meat slowly in cauldrons over open fires, but the paprika that defines modern goulash today also came from the New World. Spices and techniques moved along trade routes, and what we now label as “traditional Hungarian” is actually the product of centuries of borrowing, conquest, and creative adaptation.
Even something as seemingly straightforward as “French Fries” is contested territory. Belgium, not France, makes a strong claim as their place of origin, and versions of fried potato sticks appear in multiple culinary traditions. The potato itself arrived from South America, and only slowly became a European staple after overcoming suspicion and famine-era prejudice. Yet today, few people think of fries as an immigrant food; they’re simply “local,” wherever you happen to be eating them, from a Belgian bistro to a Toronto food truck.
Once you start looking for these patterns, you see them everywhere: chillies in Asian cuisines that predate the voyages bringing them from the Americas; coffee, now a European café staple, originating in East Africa and Arabia; sugar shaping everything from Caribbean economies to British tea habits. A single plate becomes an edible map of global history.
One dish, many passports
Culinary anthropology invites us to follow a dish across borders and ask: how did this end up here ?
Imagine a simple stuffed dumpling. In Italy, it’s ravioli; in Poland, pierogi; in Georgia, khinkali; in Nepal and Bhutan, momos. Different flours, fillings, and broths, but the same underlying idea: wrap something precious in dough, protect it while cooking, and stretch ingredients to feed more people. The form travels because the logic travels. Each culture makes it its own, and yet the family resemblance remains. (I love them all, but I think Georgian khinkalis are my favourite.)
On our trips, members often notice this without having the vocabulary for it. They’ll taste something in Portugal that reminds them of a dish from a past trip to Greece; they’ll recognize a spice profile in Morocco that echoes food they had in southern Spain. These are living traces of past movement: Arab traders in the Mediterranean, Ottoman influence in the Balkans, colonial exchanges in the Caribbean.
When you realize that, dinner stops being just “What’s on the menu tonight?” and becomes, “What does this dish reveal about who passed through here, who stayed, and what they brought with them?”
Why we design trips around the table
This is why we place so much emphasis on food in our itineraries, more than most traditional tours. It’s not just about “good restaurants” or avoiding tourist traps, although we do that too. It’s about using meals as intentional touchpoints for understanding place, history, and each other.
A few principles shape how we do this:
– We strive to choose venues where someone cares about the story behind the food, family-run tavernas, small osterias, local wine estates, rather than generic hotel restaurants.
– We build in time for meals instead of squeezing them between packed activities, so conversation can stretch and digestion can keep up with the day.
– We use food as a way to connect members to hosts and local guides: cooking classes in someone’s backyard, wine tastings led by the winemaker, market walks where you learn what locals actually cook on Tuesday nights.
Because our pacing is deliberately slower, meals aren’t rushed refuelling stops; they’re part of the architecture of the day. That’s one reason members often say they don’t “need a holiday from their holiday” after our trips: you’re not bolting down a set menu so you can be back on the bus in 45 minutes. You’re allowed to linger. (Editor’s note: We can’t always do it this way, for obvious logistical reasons, but it is something we try to be mindful of during the design and redesign process of every trip.)
Migration, memory, and your own palate
Food also has a way of collapsing the distance between “there” and “home.” Many of our members are children or grandchildren of immigrants. When they taste a dish in “the old country,” it can trigger powerful memories: the way their grandmother cooked on Sundays, the smells in a kitchen they haven’t seen in decades, the feeling of being part of something larger than themselves.
Equally, they’re surprised to discover that the “authentic” version abroad doesn’t match the dish they grew up with in Canada. That gap is its own story – a record of adaptation to new ingredients, new climates, and new economic realities. In that sense, culinary anthropology isn’t just about tracing the movement of food; it’s about tracing the movement of families, including our own.
On a group trip, these moments rarely stay private. Someone at the table will say, “This reminds me of…” and suddenly the conversation widens: childhood, migration, identity, the way recipes shift as they cross oceans. The dish in front of you becomes a bridge between your life and the place you’re visiting.
Why this matters for how we travel
So no, most of us don’t list “food” as the primary reason we book a trip. We say we’re going to Sicily for the landscapes, to Japan for the temples, to Portugal for the coastline. But in practice, the meals are where the day comes together, the place where you process what you’ve seen, compare notes with fellow travellers, and absorb a culture through its most intimate rituals.
That’s why we keep designing itineraries where the table is central, not incidental. Not because we expect everyone to be a gourmet, but because food is one of the most accessible forms of anthropology there is. You don’t need a degree to understand migration when you can see tomatoes in an Italian sauce, potatoes in an Irish stew, or chillies in a Thai curry and know, viscerally, that none of them started there.
In the end, tracing one dish across borders is really about tracing the movement of people: what they carry with them, what they leave behind, and how they adapt along the way. When we travel together and pay attention to what’s on the plate, we’re not just eating well, we’re participating in that story.
And if you come home remembering the meals as vividly as the monuments, that’s not an accident. That’s by design.