Scope and/or tagging for "local ingredients" questions?

Question

The following questions have been posted:

• Local special ingredients on Cape Cod (tagged local, recommendation; just posted)
• Ingredients: Danish local specials (tagged untagged, meaning original tags were removed)
• Ingredients: Icelandic local specials (tagged resources)

These questions seem extremely broad, especially the latest one which alternates between discussing ingredients and flat-out asking for recipe recommendations. I want to say that they appear to be useful despite their wide scope, but that's not really supported by the numbers; the original "local specials" questions have been around since 2011 and have only been viewed about 160 times total. Statistically, these just aren't topics people search for.

So, my questions to you are:

1. Should we just close these? They're borderline/off-topic and low traffic, so I think we would need a compelling reason not to close them.

2. If anyone is vehemently against closing them, how would you propose to tag them? Clearly, tagging these questions has always been a problem, which is why we have one question with a nonsensical tag, one with no real tags, and one that resulted in two new tags getting created today just for that question. There is no way that either a local or recommendation tag is going to survive the day; what can it be replaced with that isn't a meta tag?

Answer 1

The more I look at these, the less I see them as the same type of question. It looks to me like you're grouping these three together as a specific case, but I think they should be handled differently.

To me, the Cape Cod question is clearly overly broad; I read it as largely soliciting recipes for regional foods, with even the "region" being loosely defined. There are a whole lot of interesting questions which could be spun off of this to meet our Q&A format, such as:

• What should I look for when buying fresh Maine lobster?
• How is "Vermont cheddar" different from other types of cheddar?
• Where can I find fresh cranberries when they're out of season?

These are highly specific, and are likely to get some fact-based answers, but the original question amounts to "what can I cook?" which clearly falls outside our typical guidelines. It should be closed as overly broad/primarily opinion-based.

The other two questions are different; they're both from the same OP, and they're less focused on "what can I cook/eat while I'm traveling" and more on "what can I bring back from my trip?" That gets into issues that are well outside the scope of SA and are better suited (as suggested by @Jefromi) to travel.stackexchange.com. Notably, there are visa and import questions involved that we're totally unqualified to answer; you might be able to buy yourself some putrefied shark meat, but good luck getting it onto the plane. It's worth noting that Travel.SE already has a tag for food-and-drink questions that appear to cover similar topics, so this would appear to be generally on-topic for them.

I think the fact that there are only a couple of these questions means that they're exceptions on SA, and we don't really need a specific tag or precedent to handle them. I can't think of a good tag or rule that could be applicable only to questions like these and not to other very specific, good questions about regional foods which solicit solid answers.