Indonesia Food Travel Book listed in Gourmand’s Best Books 1995-2020

Our Association’s Ambassador in Indonesia, Amanda Niode, recently informed us that Gourmand International’s World Cookbook Awards recently announced the “Gourmand World Cook Book Awards Best of the Best 1995-2020,” a list of the best books selected from Gourmand Awards winners over the past 25 years. One of the books is “Trailing the Taste of Gorontalo” published in 2015 by the Indonesia-based Omar Niode Foundation. It is a collection of writings and a series of portraits of food and culture tourism in the Province of Gorontalo, Indonesia.

The book, edited by Amanda Katili Niode, WFTA’s official ambassador in the Wallacea region of Indonesia has 24 articles, including 2 pieces by our Executive Director Erik Wolf. It also features 57 photographs, 9 recipes and 10 testimonials from national and international tourism and culinary figures, and has become a reference for those who are interested in visiting Gorontalo.

Every year since 1995, Gourmand International awards “The Gourmand World Cookbook Awards” for the best food and drink books from around the world in various categories. For the best books in the last 25 years, specifically for food, the categories assessed are authors, publishers, country-regions, lifestyles, subjects, and charity-raising. Each category is divided into a number of sub-categories.

The Gourmand Award considers food and drink content in various types of publications either print or digital, paid or free, printed for public or private, commercial or self-published, as well as large and small books.

In food culture, there are 785 books or publications from 106 countries selected in the “Gourmand World Cookbook Awards Best of the Best 1995-2020.”

France is the country with the most books chosen, with 11% of all the best publications in the last 25 years. Books from Indonesia that have received the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards and selected to be the “Best of the Best 1995-2020,” include:

The books selected for Gourmand World Cookbook Awards are also exhibited at the Paris Cookbook Fair. It is scheduled to take place on 3 -7 June 2020 as part of the “Village International de la Gastronomie” event under the High Patronage of, Emmanuel Macron President of the French Republic. The Cook Book Exhibition in Paris will feature culinary books from 170 countries, as well as a meeting place for networking publishers, writers, agents, photographers, TV producers, graphic designers, tourism offices and specialized media from various countries in the world.

Amanda Katili Niode highly appreciates the decision by Gourmand International, because the selection of Indonesian books, which are rich in herbs and spices, in the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards Best of the Best 1995-2020, is an opportunity to elevate the image of the food culture of the archipelago to the world level.

Indonesia is an important, emerging culinary destination, and the number of award-winning books this year prove that. Additionally, at least half of the World Food Travel Association’s 2019 FoodTrekking Awards went to applicants from Indonesia.