In fulfillment of my Master’s Thesis in Gastronomy from Boston University, I spent ten months studying rural placemaking, national heritage narratives, and patterns of ethnic erasure in the context of Bulgaria’s burgeoning food tourism industry. The project engages with the sociological literature on placemaking, mobility, and globalization to challenge the persistent association of rurality with passivity, demonstrating that rural actors do not simply “receive” tourism as a desperate last resort. Rather, my observations suggest that rural folks are active participants in this process, using tourism as an opportunity to support themselves in new ways while reshaping understandings of rural Bulgaria’s agrarian past and present. At the same time, while I point to the fact that these individuals and organizations act strategically to represent themselves on their own terms, I also highlight the ways these stories recreate Socialist-era patterns of ethnic erasure in the craft and curation of Bulgarian heritage. I conclude that efforts to position tourism as a means of rural economic development in Bulgaria run the risk of exacerbating inequalities that play out along ethnic lines.

This research was funded through Fulbright Bulgaria and won the Graduate Association for Food Studies’ Inaugural Distinguished Master’s Thesis Award in 2023. The project has culminated into a work-in-progress, journal-length article tentatively titled: “Tasting Place, Erasing People: Diversity & Homogeneity in Post-Socialist Bulgarian Gastronationalism.”