¿What Should the Future of Travel Journalism Look Like?
Part II of an Ongoing Series.
The water was muddy brown and the promenade, which stretched as far as my eyes could reach, curved along the Río Parana. I was on a pit stop in the provincial capital of Santa Fe in Northeastern Argentina to eat and drink my way through the afternoon. I moved slowly up the ramble, less to take in the scenery and more to stop my hips from clicking after six days of cooking on my feet. Joggers slowly emerged as the afternoon sun washed away the morning fog and I felt a tinge of jealousy of their agility as my feet began to cramp and my neck tightened from days of being on my feet.
I was in a remote part of the city, far away from where the bus had dropped me off but I didn’t mind walking to find what had been painted to me as an idyllic riverside restaurant that served local fish caught from the waters my table would have a full view of. A place I would never stumble on without some insider information. To my horror, after an hour on my feet, it was closed. This was my third of three unlucky breaks.
I arrived in Santa Fe by way of Paraná, which is separated by a river and a thirty minute bus ride, where I was spending the week writing and developing recipes. There the food and drink scene was old school, or in the words of my host, a ‘primitive’ steak and french fries kind of city. Everyday we bought fresh produce and fish from the barrio de pescadores and built veggie heavy feasts with a side of fish for ourselves at home.
We tried out every method of fire possible: a makeshift grill we built on the beach, a traditional Argentine parrilla, a chimney and a hole in the ground fit with a recycled washing machine tub. I learned about local fish species, talked to fishermen about overfishing and uneven access to water, and walked through the city’s country backroads to forage native peppercorns and wild arugula. It was exactly the kind of slow burning, deep learning travel that I always hope to encounter. The sort of situations that align from a mixture of reading and planning ahead and letting a trip take on a life of its own; of letting myself be a passenger.
On the first day, we sat on the banks of the Río Paraná fishing for lunch. I helped pull the fish from the river, watched it be gutted and washed with the water it came from and helped prepare it for the grill. Its muscles twitched under my fingers as I rubbed it with garlic. It was a moment that challenged my understanding of food: how easy it is to take life in order to sustain mine until it's staring me straight in the eyes. What if this were the only way to eat meat, I wondered. We said a silent prayer and thanked the river for its generosity. The whole experience was magical.
Is this not what travel is? An opportunity to push ourselves outside of the realms of the norms of our own construction?
Yet this nagging feeling kept crawling into the forefront of my mind: I needed to explore and discover as many new things as I could; I needed to find a story; I needed to indulge myself. It was in that deliberate pleasure seeking that I had my most mediocre afternoon. The day ended with a late lunch that tasted like the kitchen’s leftovers, a pint at a brewery that couldn’t decide between projecting The Count of Monte Cristo on the wall or blasting a reggaeton cover album of Miley Cyrus’ seminal Bangerz topped off with an over sugared cookie that I ate begrudgingly as I walked (in the wrong direction) back to the bus station. Santa Fe was my object, indulging me was its duty and it roundly failed.
I have been thinking a lot about the way that travel media conditions us to treat destinations as commodities; as a shopping list of sorts. The way modern travel teaches us not to see complex realities but an easy digestible, easy to sell version of a place (re: Netflix Street Food and Someone Feed Phil’s racist re-telling of Buenos Aires). Commodities are built to appeal to as many people as possible and thus modern travel is designed in a way that we end up experiencing the same world no matter where we are on the globe. A world without blemishes; a world in black and white. The common denominators are our own pleasure; our own indulgence. Can we indulge and also respect? How can travel media accompany this and shift our attention to what a place truly is and not just what it can provide to us?
This is why I was so struck by the Netflix docuseries High on the Hog. Host Stephen Satterfield (who many here will recognize for his work at Whetstone Magazine) turns the food travelogue completely on its head as he follows the legacies of Pan-African cuisines and its impact on food across the United States. The remarkable thing about the show isn’t just that it allows a member of the diaspora to examine itself but it doesn’t hero worship, it doesn’t build story arcs that land on a hopeful conclusion or pretend to tell anything more than a fragment of the story in the much larger picture of humanity. He observes, he listens and lets others speak. He learns, and so do we, a little about the place and a lot about ourselves and our shared histories and remarkable differences.
I wonder how many viewers watch High on the Hog and see it as a travel series; as a blueprint for how we should move in the world when we are guests far from home. Food is certainly the lens but it isn’t the object of Satterfield’s consumption. Knowledge is.
Certainly this is a harder way to travel, to gain access to locals, to listen and learn. It requires a circular exchange. One where the traveler isn’t only catered to but caters to the place. This to me is the definition of pleasure. For me, it is indulgent to meet someone new, to hear their stories, hopefully with a shared meal and a glass of wine. It is indulgent to take the time to walk down a street and collect wild arugula and native peppercorns and use them to cook food from the market. This is special to me because of its singularity — the way it challenges a sedentary desire to make every place we visit comfortable and uniform and creates a fuller picture of the world.