Food: Food Items as Travel Souvenirs

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Food Items as Travel Souvenirs
Saturday, November 05, 2005

When you go on vacation, you probably treat yourself to a few souvenirs of some sort. Different people obviously have different preferences when it comes to souvenirs. For example, some people might collect spoons with city, state, or country names on the handles. Other people might choose to stick with key chains, shot glasses, or t-shirts. If you are lucky enough to travel a great deal, then you could soon end up with a huge collection of trinkets that take up a lot of drawer, shelf, or closet space. This can occasionally lead to problems, particularly if storage space is limited.

When I spent time in Japan, I learned an interesting tidbit about the way many Japanese people deal with travel souvenirs. In that country, gift-giving is a big part of the culture. So if you travel somewhere, even if it is just a day trip to Disneyland, you are expected to bring back souvenirs for your co-workers, close friends, and family. Purchasing shot glasses or t-shirts for all those people on your list would be extremely costly. Similarly, receiving these items from others who travel would inevitably lead to a mountain of clutter in your home or office. So what the Japanese do is purchase food items as souvenirs.

These food items don't have to be anything elaborate or expensive. In fact, one of the most common food souvenirs is a tin of cookies. The tin is usually decorated with famous scenes from the tourist destination that you visited (for example, Mt. Fuji at sunset, etc.). Then when you go back to your office, you just open the tin and put the cookies out for everyone to enjoy. For close friends or maybe even your boss, you'd probably give an additional food gift that they can enjoy on their own without having to share with anyone else.

Because giving food gifts is such an integral part of the culture, these types of items take up most of the shelf space in souvenir stores. You'd really be hard-pressed to find a souvenir t-shirt at an out-of-the-way tourist spot, but you'd have plenty of food choices. In addition to cookies, other popular food souvenirs from travel destinations include chocolate, miniature cakes, dried fish, and a variety of Japanese sweets.

It took a while for me to get used to buying food items as souvenirs, but I have to admit that I really do see the benefits of this kind of system. These days, I still try to buy these kinds of souvenirs whenever possible and to share them with my co-workers. I've discovered that it's a lot harder to get food souvenirs here in the United States. The food items I find are usually at one extreme or the other. For example, they are either very expensive and not very appropriate for the office, or they are so cheap that they look like they just came from the corner grocery store rather than from a tourist spot. But I generally manage to come up with something.

The next time you go on vacation, why not try purchasing food souvenirs for the people on your gift list? After all, most people would probably take chocolate over another key chain any day!

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