Why I trained as a culinary tour guide in Israel

I love food. I always have, and over the years of guiding it quietly stopped being something I did on my own time and started showing up in the tours themselves; a bakery here, a spice stall there, a winery on the way to somewhere else.

Guests were asking for it more and more (culinary travel has become one of the fastest-growing reasons people pick a destination, and Israel happens to be very good at it). So when the guides’ school emailed to offer a course in culinary tourism, I signed up.

That was back in the winter of 2018. I have been meaning to write it up properly ever since, and life, as it does, kept getting in the way. Here it finally is.

Israel’s only culinary tourism certification

The course was the only one of its kind in the country, an official Ministry of Tourism culinary-tourism certification for licensed guides. It ran over five sessions, one long day a week, each built around a different part of Israel and a different piece of the food story.

Some days were out in the field (farms, wineries, markets, a Druze kitchen); one was in the classroom, getting the theory and the history straight before we went anywhere.

It was a small group, around sixteen of us, all guides and all seriously into food; I was the youngest in the room. Our lead instructor was Hagit Avron, a guide and writer who specialises in culinary tourism, and she set the tone on day one.

I went in already comfortable feeding people on tour. What I wanted was the depth behind it; to be able to stand in a market and explain why a thing tastes the way it does, who makes it, and what it says about the place, rather than pointing at something and saying “this is great, try it”.

What a culinary tour actually is

The first day, in the classroom, started with a deceptively simple question: who is the culinary tourist? They are not (mostly) people chasing fancy restaurants. They are people who want to understand a country through what it grows, cooks and eats.

Then came the history of Israeli cuisine, which is a pretty short story (the country was only founded in 1948), but a lot has happened in that time! We went from tzena, the austerity and ration books of the early state, when there was barely enough to go round, to a country that now turns up on the world’s best-food lists and sends its chefs abroad. Once you know that arc, every meal on a tour starts to mean something more.

Four days across the country

The course was built around four field days:

1. The Sharon, with its farms and small wineries doing a quiet version of Tuscany.
2. The slopes around Zichron Ya’akov and Binyamina, where the modern Israeli wine industry was born.
3. The Western Galilee, the richest of the lot, where Jewish, Arab, Druze and Bedouin kitchens sit within a few minutes of each other.
4. Tel Aviv, walking the Carmel Market with a chef to trace how the city became the loud, brilliant food destination it is now.

I’ll take each day in turn over the next few posts, in the order they happened, with the people and the places and what I learned at each. First, though, we had to spend some time in the classroom.

If a few good meals and the stories behind them are the kind of thing you’d want on your own trip, that is something I build into tours all the time; or we can dedicate a full day to it with my Israel: a culinary melting pot itinerary.