Seeing where food comes from can be both an educational and harrowing experience. When you travel, tours of fish markets, breweries and other stops in the consumption chain make for amazing learning opportunities.

Tsukiji Fish Market was a highlight of my trip to Japan. Checking out Brooklyn Brewery just over the bridge from where I live was a great afternoon. Seeing how food and drink go from raw ingredients to our plates is not just great for travel memories, it’s also worth knowing for your own health.

What foods and drinks have you seen from beginning to end in your travels? Share your experiences in the comments.

I already discussed why it’s OK to take tours. Now, over at Gadling, I cover what questions to ask before booking a tour. From language issues, to cultural issues to how much size matters, there are many things to consider before embarking on a guided tour.

How to decide if a tour is right for you

Some people are so intent on being independent travelers that they dismiss all tours as commercial, disingenuous and inauthentic. Those people are idiots. Am I being harsh? Perhaps. But those holier than thou travelers don’t make the rules for everyone who travels. They simply make rules for themselves and project their ideologies on the rest of us. There are some wonderful tours out there and sometimes they offer the best opportunities to enjoy some truly wonderful experiences.

Janelle Nanos, Special Projects Editor at National Geographic Traveler, wrote (eloquently, I might add) about this topic on Intelligent Travel before taking a tour of Morocco. Janelle and I recently discussed her opinions on tours and how her experience changed how she views them.

“Tours are a tricky thing. As a travel editor, I’m supposed to turn up my nose at them and focus solely on forging my own path,” she said. When it came to Morocco, she added, “a tour seemed like a smart way to do it.” She noted that there were several factors that helped change her opinion on tours.

“I found a tour company, Intrepid Travel, that shared my same ideals about sustainable and authentic travel and came highly recommended (both from my colleagues, and my magazine, which has included them in our annual Tours of a Lifetime issue).”

Janelle noted that the size of the group can affect the tour experience. Her Moroccan tour was “a small group trip, maxing out at 12 people. That meant no big buses, no crowded tourist restaurant.”

Lastly, when it comes to language barriers, having a guide can be the difference between having a superficial experience and truly having an opportunity to explore nooks and crannies that may otherwise have been challenging for travelers to find. Janelle noted that “it made spending two weeks in a foreign country where Arabic is the predominant language (a language I unfortunately do not speak) much easier to navigate, and it enabled us to travel further and into more regional areas than I may have ventured on my own.”

Are tours for everyone? I would argue that there probably is some type of tour experience that could satisfy any type of traveler. Will every traveler be willing to set aside their steadfast ideals and experiment with a tour? No. But we all need to make our own rules. If you want to take a tour, take one. Just follow Janelle’s advice and find a tour operator that shares your ideals so that you are not offended by how they do their business. Seek recommendations. And, of course, keep an open mind.

I’ll let Janelle’s final thoughts on tours close things out:

Traveling with a tour group can often feel like a canned experience, where everyone is going through the motions, but a good tour–and I now can attest that such a thing does exist, despite my own instincts to say the opposite–feels like getting around with a local and a few friends.

Special thanks to Janelle Nanos, Special Projects Editor at National Geographic Travel, for sharing her thoughts with me. You can read more of her work (and that of many other talented travel writers) on Intelligent Travel.