Indigenous Gastronomy in the Chittagong Hill Tracts: A Study on the Application of Information Technology for Tourism Development

Abstract

Nowadays, Information Technology is an effective tool for tourists to choose how they enjoy their pastimes in the postmodern world. Information and communication technologies provide a prospect to promote gastronomy in the tourism industry. Indigenous gastronomy is one of the major attractions to the tourists beyond globalized common cuisine. The Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) is the area of inhabitants of eleven indigenous communities, and characterized as the districts of cultural diversity, multi-ethnic food and beauty of natural settings in South Asia. In CHT, indigenous food culture is currently an utmost desirable cuisine to the tourists whenever they sensitize it as a “primitive” dish. Hotels, motels, and restaurants exhibit different indigenous traditional food items in their menus to draw the attention of the visitors. They distribute leaflets and hang banners by addressing traditional food lists of indigenous communities. Many tourist agencies advertise the hotels, motels and restaurants with indigenous food items to drag tourists in local and national print and electronic media. Thousands of webs, online groups, and pages are found comprising indigenous gastronomy and showing its special appearance for the national and international tourists who have a keen interest in local cuisine especially traditional indigenous culinary. Some motel and cottage owners appoint indigenous people in their offices and restaurants to get tourists’ attraction. So, the chapter will travel around the application of information and communication technologies to promote the indigenous gastronomy in the CHT. Moreover, it will also illustrate how social media are playing a contributing role to the development of indigenous gastronomy in this tourist hub of Bangladesh. Methodologically, the ethnographic approaches were employed to collect data from the field.