Spiritual understanding and experience in the creative tourism of gastronomy

By producing the paradigm of creative tourism, the knowledge increasing discipline of tourism invites tourists to visit and interact with unique and live culture of societies instead of just sightseeing in museums and ancient monuments. In this paradigm, tourists engage all of their senses in the creation of their unique experience and improve their relations with local people from seller/buyer to a master/apprentice level. Not only the cultural capital, but also the social capital would be increased from this interaction. The main goal of this research is to show that contrary to what appears at first, the creative domain of gastronomy is a spiritual one and flourishing local communities and creative tourism based on this paradigm can evolve the wellbeing and material life of inhabitants and tourists as well, and includes significant spiritual endowments both for guests and hosts in the creative gastronomic destinations. Creative tourism based on gastronomy regards new looks to local communities as the first step in creating unique and added value experiences (Including economic, human and social values). In this paper, it is shown by thematic analysis and Delphi method that the components of spiritual perception have significant overlaps with the components of gastronomic creative tourism. In other words, “comfort and satisfaction”, “Giving meaning to life”, “interaction with others”, “friendship with nature and environment” and “surrender and thanksgiving...