You are what you eat; we’ve always known it. Say mushy peas to anyone born in the UK, and there’s no doubt which end of the country you’re talking about. When the Wigan-bred but London-based broadcaster Stuart Maconie decided to go “in search of the North” in his recent book Pies and Prejudice, he rediscovered many defining features of northern England: friendliness, inclement weather and vomit on the pavements. But it’s when he’s writing about food – the sticky bun enjoyed at a bus station, the steak pudding served with plastic fork, the “lovely lardy universe” of pies – that he finds his most sensually evocative and immediate way to spirit up a place and its people. The pies of Wigan tell of a need for warmth, comfort and weight in the belly, of men nostalgic for our mam’s cooking, of queues at the pie van on match days. There is culture and climate, history and geography packed inside a pie.

It makes sense, then, that the latest batch of travel books has been penned not by travel writers but by food writers. We live in an age of epicureanism. Our chefs are celebrities, cooking programmes are a fixture on the TV and, as I write, cookery books hog the number 1 (Delia), number 4 (Jamie) and number 16 (Gordon) slots on Amazon’s UK bestseller list. Travelling abroad was once about getting a snap of yourself in front of the Taj Mahal. Now it’s about getting a table at El Bulli. Instead of silver spoons and Eiffel Towers we bring home saucisson and olive oil. Food is both a mark of our worldliness and of how we map the globe.

When Fuchsia Dunlop got a scholarship to study in the Sichuan city of Chengdu in 1992, she was supposed to study Chinese policy on ethnic minorities. Bored and frustrated by the propaganda-filled books in the university library, she found herself increasingly distracted by what she was eating. She went on to become Chinese cooking’s unofficial ambassador to Britain, publishing two acclaimed cookery books and writing about Chinese food for the FT.

In her memoir of this 15-year passion, Shark’s Fin & Sichuan Pepper, she explains how it all began: hanging around the fresh food markets, chatting to stall-holders as they skinned a twitching rabbit or let the blood drain from the throat of a bewildered duck. “They didn’t kill animals before they cooked and ate them,” she notes. “They simply went about the process of preparing a creature for the pot ...and at some random point it died.” Testament to her courage, she ended up enrolling on a professional chef’s course in Chengdu – the first foreigner ever to do so.

In lesser hands, the grisly jokes about rubbery goose intestines, monkeys’ brains and dogs’ penises would be relentless. But Dunlop has more respect for her subject than that. At chef school she learns to wield a cleaver – the Chinese chef’s sole tool – to chop, mince, pound, filet, skin, pare and carve. As she turns out Sichuanese specialities such as “fire-exploded kidney flowers” and “fish-fragrant aubergines”, she discovers a cuisine just as sophisticated as anything to come out of France or Italy. Learning about another country’s food, she observes, is “like learning a language. In the beginning, you know nothing about its most basic rules of grammar”. By the end she’s fluent in a canon of some 23 “complex flavours”, eight subtly different words for “stir-fry” and the nine different ways to chop a spring onion.

Just as each region in China has its own temperament, along the way she discovers it has developed its own cuisine to match. The Sichuanese, like their food, are “laid-back and charming [with] an undertone of sweetness to their manner”, while the people of Hunan are “brusque”, their food “aggressively hot”, sour and salty. She calls Sichuanese food the “spice girl” of China and Hunanese – the food that nourished Chairman Mao – the “food of war”.

As with the best travel writers, Dunlop is fundamentally altered by her experience of China. Fifteen years and many visits later, she finds herself in Yangzhou. Here she discovers “the food of peace”. No more the gourmet glutton, Dunlop learns the Chinese art of eating “skilfully”. It is, of course, a lesson in moderation that applies to the rest of life too – food eventually leads Dunlop to a philosophy.

The self-confessedly “immensely greedy” Matthew Fort discovers there’s no such thing as moderation either in himself or in Sicily. In Sweet Honey, Bitter Lemons, his aim is to “understand Sicily by eating it”. He travels the island on a bright red Vespa named Monica, puttering from one humungous feast to another, avoiding archaeological sites and architecture along the way. When he’s not eating, he’s either panicking about where he’s going to find his next meal or desperately looking for a piece of shade in which to sleep the last one off.

As with Dunlop’s book, Sweet Honey is studded with recipes for the mouth-watering dishes he devours: caponata, farsumagru, pasta o furnu. The best way to read it is to cook as you go – my copy is splattered with sauce.

Many of the dishes Fort discovers tell a story. The memorably named spaghetti con le sarde scappate, for example, comprises raisins, pine nuts, garlic, parsley, breadcrumbs and oil – but no sarde, or sardines. It started out as a dish for the wealthy and was subsequently adapted by the poor who – unable to afford sardines – declared the fish had scappate, escaped. In Leonforte, Fort is introduced to a prodigiously big broad bean, the fava larga di Leonforte, grown here for centuries but now in danger of becoming extinct. Its other name is la carne dei poveri – the poor used to grow it for its high protein content. These days no one wants to grow the food of the poor; they want to show they can afford to eat meat. Dish by dish, Fort patches together Sicily’s culinary traditions and how the island’s fortunes have dictated what goes on in its kitchens. “Food,” he says, “is history on a plate”.

Fort has no shame about his intake: he writes with glorious, gluttonish sensuality about gooey pastries and the oiliness left in the mouth after eating ventresca – the tuna equivalent of belly of pork. It’s this unfettered enjoyment that endears him to his subjects: Sicilians, of course, love their food too. And for a travel writer, what better way to get invited into people’s homes than to display a matching appreciation. Privy to a “marvellous” 20-minute debate about the precise texture of ricotta, and the proper relationship of ricotta to sponge in a cassata siciliana, he asks: “Would we debate the proper consistency and minutiae of simnel cake, let’s say, or Dundee cake, with the same passion?”

The answer is no, of course. And that’s the key to this sort of travel book: it’s great as long as you travel among people who take their food seriously. Would a foodalogue work in Norway, one wonders, or Canada?

France is famously serious about its food. In Paris, culinary passion even gets Michael Booth, author of Sacré Cordon Bleu, out of paying a fine on the Métro. Caught travelling without any photo ID, he shows his cordon bleu recipe folder instead. The guard’s face softens; he lets Booth off the €30 penalty.

A journalist and enthusiastic home cook, Booth wanted to be a “proper cook”. “A proper cook knows techniques rather than formulas; a proper cook can look at a plate of raw ingredients and conjure an infinite repertoire of dishes,” he writes. So he makes a dramatic bonfire of all his Nigella Lawsons, Jamie Olivers and Alastair Littles, takes his family to Paris and enrols at Le Cordon Bleu for nine months.

Under the stern gaze of a pantomime cast of exacting, power-hungry French chefs, Booth duly turns out the roasted meats, fish in buttery sauces, bisques, parfaits and gratins of classic French haute cuisine, complete with vegetables carved into rugby balls. It all seems very old-fashioned today: the dishes are extravagant, rich and fiddly, high in butter and salt, and there’s a lot of waste. In contrast to Dunlop’s single cleaver, Booth has umpteen different knives in his trousse.

All this fuss and formality is peculiarly French. Booth argues that the Italians invented good food in Europe; the French just formalised it. They were the first to publish cookery books (in the 17th century), bring out menus, divide savoury from sweet and eat in sophisticated restaurants (late 18th century). They even produced the first restaurant critic, Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de la Reynière.

For the French, food is an art form; and the constant striving for visual perfection on the plate makes Booth’s nine months horribly stressful. An extremely competitive fellow student accuses him of being an “asshole” – he always has an ungracious comment at the ready for anyone getting better grades. A last-minute realisation that “IT’S ONLY FOOD!” saves him, and my copy of his book, from ending up in the Seine.

Perhaps there are conclusions to be drawn here about the French taking their food too seriously – this book certainly has a notable absence of joy compared with Fort’s or Dunlop’s. But I suspect this has more to do with Booth than the French. While Dunlop starts to “think Chinese” and Fort is embraced like a long-lost relative, Booth remains – until almost the end – very much the Englishman abroad, battling with an alien way of doing things. Only after his course, and a scarring stint as a stagiaire at L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon, does he finally have his epiphany: cooking is really about making food for the people you love.

The best travel books take an author on a journey that is as much personal as physical. Eating a country’s food with gusto is a visceral, literal way of allowing yourself to be changed by another culture. And because enjoying a meal is as much about the company as the food, it’s a brilliant way to get to know people. But perhaps even more than with other travel books, foodalogues remind us that a sensory encounter such as eating really has to be experienced first hand. Fort’s description of the solitary meal he enjoys on the dusty station platform at Villarosa, with three cats howling pitifully beneath his table, brings the point home beautifully. We may live in cosmopolitan cities with restaurants serving food from all parts of the globe, and we may own all the recipes, but for the authentic gastronomic experience you really have to leave home. After all, mushy peas never tasted good south of the Watford Gap.