About Kelly

I'm from Chengdu, which means I was raised by people who take food seriously and argue about it constantly. So I studied it. Food science for my bachelor's, then a master's in Food Identity across four European countries.

What I found in Europe was a place that talks about food the way Chengdu does — obsessively, specifically, with real arguments about who's allowed to call a thing by its name. But almost none of that conversation reaches Chinese travellers. It arrives flattened into star ratings and must-eat lists.

That's the gap I work in. Not because Paris is hard to visit — because it's easy to visit and come home with nothing.

My training followed the map of protected European food

Angers, France

The first thing we were asked to define was what counts as traditional — a question that sounds simple until you learn people go to court over it.

Piacenza, Italy

Sensory analysis. Months of being trained into an instrument — learning to break delicious down into words you can record, compare, and defend to someone who disagrees with you.

Cluj-Napoca, Romania

European policy and regulation. The first time I saw clearly who is actually in the room when a label gets written. I came back here a year later to do my thesis.

Thessaloniki, Greece

Fieldwork. Out of the classroom and in front of the people who actually make the food — who are, reliably, not very interested in our frameworks.

Lempdes, France

Origin products and quality labels — taught in arguably the best place in Europe to teach it, because the surrounding region holds five separate AOP cheeses.

Research & Expertise

DiscoverEAT is a project born from the Erasmus experience: the best way to know a place is through its food, its streets, and the stories only a local can tell. I create private, in-depth experiences for curious travelers who want more than the usual landmarks.

The work on culinary tourism — DiscoverEAT: Travel, Eat, Share — was published in a peer-reviewed academic journal, examining how food shapes meaningful travel and cultural exchange. It's the foundation of how I design every experience: authentic, memorable, and genuinely enriching.

Fourteen countries in one classroom

My cohort came from fourteen countries. Two years of arguing about food across all of them is where I learned to explain one culture to another without flattening either.

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