Shannon Bard staged at Arzak in San Sebastian - one of the most respected kitchens in the world.  She has cooked at the James Beard House. Won on Food Network. Spent nearly two decades building relationships in kitchens that don't advertise themselves.

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She built Flavors And Frontiers because she kept seeing the same thing everywhere she traveled.  Performance marketed as culture. Watered-down versions of local food passed off as generational. Culinary tourism that extracts from a place and gives nothing back.  And in doing so, slowly hollows it out. 

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The knowledge lives in the hands. When those hands stop, it is gone.

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Every journey she builds is access to the working version of a place. The kitchen that feeds the neighborhood, the technique passed from grandmother to daughter, the market before the vendors set up the tourist section. Not because it makes a better trip. Because it the only version worth preserving. 

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You are not a guest being managed.  You are a person being taken somewhere real.  The difference matters to the culture.  It matters to Shannon.  It will matter to you.