Globalization, overtourism, climate crisis, and social change can all contribute to the loss of beloved cultural practices—including what we eat. But what does this mean for cultural and food heritage? And how can travelers help preserve the flavors that make our experiences so much richer?
At a roadside dhaba in rural Rajasthan, I tucked into familiar favorites: Dal bati, baked wheat rolls with a spicy lentil soup and garlic chutney, and churma, a sweet dish made by cooking coarsely ground wheat with ghee and sugar. These dishes have come to epitomize the cuisine of this border state in northwest India.
The chatty older woman rolling the dough balls told me of Rajasthani dishes that had almost vanished over the past few decades: Aam ki ghutli ki sabji, made from the soft pit inside dried mango seeds when greens were scarce; areethe ki chaat, a vegetable dish made from the air potato, a type of yam and part of tribal diets for generations, and shahjan ke phoolon ki sabji, a stir-fry with mature moringa pods.
This quick conversation threw up a bigger question: What disappears when a place’s food fades? A dish can vanish for many reasons. Ingredients become harder to grow. Skills stop being passed down. Older methods are too slow for industry. Tourism reshapes what gets cooked. Tastes change. And that’s what inspired the thinking behind Intrepid Travel’s Endangered Dishes list, which flags foods threatened by climate change, cultural dilution, and declining skills.
Food journalist Dan Saladino, who curated the list alongside award-winning author and broadcaster Yasmin Khan, is the author of Eating to Extinction. He sees an endangered dish as a warning signal. Losing a dish doesn’t just mean losing a recipe; it can also mean losing agricultural knowledge, biodiversity, skills and memory. “In a rapidly changing, unstable world, these are things we need. They provide resilience and they give us options for our food future,” Saladino says.
Over thousands of years, humans found ways of adapting to different environments, often experimenting with plants and animals to create strategies for survival, and find sources of pleasure. “Many of the endangered dishes we helped to identify are part of that story,” adds Saladino. “All are ingenious, Indigenous and delicious ways in which life could be sustained and enjoyed in a specific location for the long-term.”
The list includes Petkhvis Chvishtari, a savory patty mixed with egg and cheese, made from Petkhvis, a rare black millet variety native to Georgia (the country); Mosbolletjies from South Africa, soft, slightly sweet buns made with mos, freshly crushed grape juice containing skins and seeds; Inanchila, a sweet sticky rice dessert topped with caramelized coconut cream from The Philippines; and Cuscos Transmontanos com Coelho, a slow-cooked rabbit stew from northern Portugal served with hand-rolled wheat pasta.
“What comes up again and again is the fear that nobody younger is watching them cook anymore, cares about the ecology around them, or wants any part of the community’s way of doing things.”
- Dipali Khandelwal, The Kindness Meal project
Dr Lenore Newman, culinary geographer and food historian, describes cuisine as a language spoken in ingredients and technique. “When we lose a dish either through loss of ingredients or techniques, we lose a piece of our community. Food is a form of cultural wealth and its loss decreases our own sense of identity and community.”
For María Fuentenebro and Mario Mimoso, co-founders of design studio Sharp and Sour which runs the traveling Museum of Endangered Foods, it’s the knowledge, ecosystems, and communities that sustain food traditions which are becoming harder to maintain, or disappearing altogether in a fast-paced, hyper-consumerist world.
But they make an important distinction: Food traditions have always evolved, but evolution is not the same as erasure. “For us, that is where evolution becomes endangerment; not when a tradition changes, but when the conditions that allow it to exist disappear.”
That understanding runs through UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage program, which treats food as a living practice rather than simply a collection of dishes. Its examples include Thailand’s tom yum kung, Azerbaijan’s tandir bread-making, and 2025 additions such as Georgian wheat culture and Egypt’s koshary.
Slow Food’s Ark of Taste takes a different approach, cataloguing endangered heritage ingredients. Since 1996, more than 6,700 foods have been identified as being at risk, from Kashmiri saffron to Armenian Vaspurakan wheat. The distinction matters because calling gumbo ‘endangered’ could be misleading: New Orleans’ most recognizable dish is still widely loved and made. But it’s the diversity of its preparations and the stories behind them that seem more fragile.
Chef Dee Lavigne, of Deelightful Roux School of Cooking in New Orleans, says gumbo was never one fixed recipe. It reflects the cultures that shaped Louisiana: West Africa, Indigenous communities, France, Spain and beyond. Most families have their own traditions around the roux, seafood, and seasoning.
Filé powder, made by grinding dried sassafras leaves, is a traditional finishing touch that’s less common today. That doesn’t mean it has disappeared, Lavigne says. Chefs develop their own techniques, and filé was never in every style of gumbo. The bigger shift is how knowledge travels.
“For generations, these techniques were not learned from written recipes,” she tells me. They were passed from grandparents to children, from cook to cook. As generations change, those traditions become harder to find. “Preserving the food is important, but preserving the story behind the food is just as important,” says Lavigne. At her cooking school, teaching gumbo means talking about the ingredients and techniques, and the cultures represented in the bowl.
Take the Chelsea bun, all the rage in 18th-century London. The coil of enriched dough filled with butter, sugar and dried fruit, finished with a sticky glaze, has been overtaken by newer pastries. Food historian and chef Dr Neil Buttery writes on his British Food: A History blog that the buns fell out of favour sometime in the early 20th century. Now, he says, “if you want to try one, you’ll have to make it.”
Some foods are at risk because of how they’re made. A New York bagel depends on hands and a kettle: Hand-rolling gives it the irregularity machines can’t replicate, while kettle-boiling creates its crust—the more common steamed versions are softer. The skill is now becoming rarer with master rollers traveling between bakeries to hand-roll more than 3,000 bagels each day.
Hong Kong’s Kwun Tong Gao soup faces a similar problem. Making the jumbo soup dumplings is complex: A meat filling and broth must be enclosed in a delicate steamed dough—without falling apart. They have grown more popular, but with a skills shortage, many restaurants serve a workaround: A large dumpling in soup.
When we choose the safety of the familiar over food rooted in local tradition, we can inadvertently contribute to the loss of irreplaceable flavors, techniques and ingredients.”
- Yasmin Khan, author and broadcaster
In 2022, Dipali Khandelwal started The Kindness Meal to preserve disappearing food traditions in the Indian state of Rajasthan. In January 2026, she set out on Food Culture Yatra, a culinary exploration through five states to document traditions that are rarely written down. She says food preserves much more than recipes; it preserves ecological knowledge, migration histories, and identity.
Across the communities she’s visited, she’s also found that the fear isn’t that a dish will disappear. “Almost nobody I’ve spoken to worries about that,” Khandelwal says. “What comes up again and again is the fear that nobody younger is watching them cook anymore, cares about the ecology around them, or wants any part of the community’s way of doing things.”
It’s less about worrying if a forgotten wild green will vanish, and more that the one person who still knows where it grows and how to use it is getting older—with no-one beside them to learn. “The anxiety was never really about food; it’s about losing an entire generation’s worth of wisdom.”
Experts also believe tourism can create demand for local food traditions and reshape them around what visitors expect. Erica Kritikides, Intrepid’s General Manager of Global Experiences, says food can help to create connection and conversation. “It’s an amazing way for travelers to learn about culture and traditions. But there’s also a real risk that we are losing culinary diversity due to factors like globalization, overtourism, climate change and changing traditions.”
She points to Venice where traditional neighborhood bakeries are disappearing and being replaced by more ‘Instagram-friendly’ restaurants or gelato stores catering to tourists instead of residents. “It’s getting harder for travelers looking for authentic food experiences to find them,” she says.
But tourism can also help revive local traditions. “Seek out locally owned restaurants and eateries—the best places to try local dishes and ensure your tourism dollars are going back to where you are visiting,” says Kritikides. “Markets are a great place to taste and buy ingredients, and meet local suppliers.”
Cooking classes also help access homecooked meals, and even create new skills to take home. “On some of our Mexico City itineraries, travelers can learn to cook the ‘endangered dish’ tlacoyos with maiz criollo at an Indigenous chinampa agriculture community,” says Kritikides. “You’re hearing about the food, its origins, and importance firsthand from the women who have been cooking it for years.”
Khan, co-curator of the Endangered Dishes list, agrees travelers have a responsibility to support the food cultures that make the places they visit so distinctive. “When we choose the safety of the familiar over food rooted in local tradition, we can inadvertently contribute to the loss of irreplaceable flavors, techniques and ingredients,” she says.
Saladino also emphasises the need to get more curious—travelers often turn to architecture and archaeology to know a place, but food is just as revealing. “Too few of us know the origin stories of foods, the incredible levels of edible diversity humans created, the rapid loss of that diversity, and why we should all care,” he says.
And perhaps positive action and inquisitiveness are the key. Khandelwal says her project to document dying traditions has changed how she thinks about preservation. “I no longer see this work as rescuing something dying or disappearing,” she says. “I’ve started believing that growing, cooking, and eating food is an act of activism in itself and every one of us already has a role in it.”
****
Adventure.com strives to be a low-emissions travel publication. We are powered by, but editorially independent of, Intrepid Travel, the world’s largest travel B Corp, who help ensure Adventure.com maintains high standards of sustainability in our work and activities. You can visit our sustainability page or read our Contributor Impact Guidelines for more information.
Teja Lele trained as an architect, only to find her love for words outweighed that for architectural drawings. An editor and writer based in India, she writes about travel, architecture, food and lifestyle, with bylines in publications such as BBC Travel, Mint Lounge, South China Morning Post, Nikkei Asia, and The New Indian Express.
