Food museums

Introduction

Links to Museums by Themes:
Food | Agriculture & Seafood | Historic Farm, Ranch & Village | Beverage

The importance of food related museums

Food vs. military museums

Food Exhibits are Entertaining

Food Museums : an introduction

"A food museum is a museum about food, pure and simple. Museums about food are a relatively new museum category, one generally overlooked by traditional guidebooks. Yet, the public's interest in food history and traditions is clearly on the rise.We are not out to determine what makes something called a museum technically legitimate. Our purpose is to pinpoint places that illuminate food history for the public. We are after the spirit of inquiry and enthusiasm for a subject, for the places that not only preserve the past but also bring it to life.

Food-related museums and food heritage sites include professional academically accredited institutions, avowedly commercial public relations ventures, earnestly unsophisticated operations, and variations on all three."

---from Gastronomie! Food Museums and Heritage Sites of France by Tom Hughes and Meredith Sayles Hughes

Museums about food & eating

True food museums, as we think of them, are few and far between. Furthermore, they are a relatively recent fusion of disciplines that combine the history of art, agriculture, food industry; natural and social sciences; archaeology; ethnography; geography; together with the emerging academic fields of gastronomy & culinary studies.

The Agropolis Museum

The Agropolis Museum is the food museum of France, and the most exciting and comprehensive museum about food we know of anywhere. Dedicated to describing the global story of people, food, and agriculture, it deftly combines solid information with exceedingly imaginative, inviting displays. Unlike many museums today that rely almost entirely on oversized graphics, Agropolis combines actual artifacts with multimedia. It goes right at the central role food plays in life, honors those who deliver and cook food, and does not neglect those whose major rule is in the eating.

Here you can walk the history of early food gathering and agriculture, and see lively mini exhibits of many of the world's fruits, vegetables and animals. You can meet eight farmers from around the world, peer into their homes and hear their stories on video.

Another exhibition on display re-creates world food and drink preparations. For example: the tea ceremony in Japan, pasta making in Italy, and coffee rituals in Ethiopia. A voyeur’s delight, you look right into a life-size corner of a fully realized room from which the family has just stepped away.

The animation and audiovisual offerings at Agropolis are numerous and changing. Two recent animations tell the story of grains in ancient Egypt, as well as bread-making in Egypt today. This exhibit is available online, as are virtual versions of the museum's three primary permanent exhibitions.

At the core of the building is a permanent sculptural exhibition called the “Banquet of Humanity”, or “The Dining Table of the World”, a creation so powerful it silenced the idle buzz of visitors every time we ventured into it. Eight couples sit at a roundtable set in furrowed ground. At the center is water and perched atop the water, Planet Earth. The couples represent three poor countries, three average income countries and two rich. The rich are Japan and France. The poorest is Somalia. Calories eaten per adult per day in France are 3,632. Somalia--1,600.

Outside the circle is another couple, utterly excluded from the table. They are naked. The woman reaches out a hand as if in cooperation, the man holds up his fist in protest. This powerful work by Henri Rouvieres goes to the heart of Agropolis's chief focus--- despite all scientific advances, money and effort, world hunger remains a battle not yet won.

Agropolis provides numerous innovative programs and activities for children. French schoolchildren can participate in La Petite Ecole du Gout, a cooking and tasting class. The museum operates a bookshop with Agropolis publications as well as books on assorted food subjects, mostly in French.

(Description excerpted from Gastronomie: Food Museums & Heritage Sites of France.)

This Agropolis display focuses on a specific food source,
in this case, the potato.

Peer into the world's kitchens in this gallery.

" The Banquet of Humanity."

Two other museums that focus on the whole story of people and their food:

Alimentarium in Vevey, Switzerland

The Culinary Archives and Museum in Providence, Rhode Island, USA

Single Food Subject Museums

There are museums about bread, oysters, olive oil, mustard, foie gras, seafood, beer, wine, coffee, jam, noodles and, of course, chocolate. Here is a report about two in Europe.

Choco-Story: The Chocolate Museum, Bruges, Belgium

At the entrance to “The Choco-Story”, the Chocolate Museum in Bruges, Belgium, opened in 2004, in a 500 year-old building, is a 120 kg chocolate egg by Belgian choco-artisan Jacky Vergote. Belgium gives Switzerland a run for its money as a chocolate capital.

The exhibition traces the history of chocolate enjoyment from the Aztecs of Mexico to the Belgian chocolatiers of today. Artifacts include Mayan pottery used for serving chocolate and 19th-century chocolate molds.

Theobroma cacao or "food of the gods," quickly caught the attention of Cortez and his Spanish invaders, who observed that Montezuma's men drank 2,000 goblets a day. Brought to Spain, chocolate was originally sold in pharmacies but soon entered the courts and the drawing rooms of the well-to-do. French Queen Marie Antoinette commissioned a blue cornflower hot chocolate service from Sevres in 1752 (a replica is on display.)

Don’t miss the tasting at the close of your visit.

The Olive Museum, Imperia, Italy

Three views of the Olive Museum, exterior and two galleries from the museum's website.

The Museo dell’Olivo is in the town of Imperia, Liguria. Fratelli Carli, an olive oil producer established in 1911, has put on display 6,000 years of olive history. This evergreen tree has helped nudge civilization along. Its fruit has lighted the way, eased passage of the stones that built the pyramids, filled coffers, and allowed cooks to sauté with ease.

Filling an Art Nouveau building that was once the company's headquarters, this artful display has grown from an original family collection of old oil lamps, containers and carved olive wood boxes. The olive’s influence through history is well illustrated by mills, measures, baubles, and tools thoughtfully placed in context.

You can also visit the modern Carli olive processing operation adjacent to the museum.

(Excerpts from the article, "Museum Options for Travelers with Taste," by Meredith Sayles Hughes, Wall Street Journal Europe, January 6, 2006.)

Food-Themed Museums

Musee has compiled the following list of food-themed museums.

Agricultural & Seafood Industry Museums

Many museums and exhibits focus on bygone food production.

Here are links to the world's agriculture/seafood museums.

Here are links to the world's village and living history museums.

Beverage Museums

Here are links to the world's museums about beverages:
beer & brewing museums, wine & viticulture museums, liquor & spirits museums.

First we eat, then we do everything else. --M.F.K.Fisher

Food museums give attention to sustenance the way other museums focus on art, war and science. In fact, food-related museums and heritage sites frequently span the traditional subject matters of other museums.

To examine how we have nourished our species is to explore all that is our world.

Food museums and their educational outreach programs are increasingly critical for several reasons. The first is that with globalization of food sources and dominance of chain restaurants, local and regional food production, marketing, cooking and dining traditions are quickly disappearing. Museums will be the only places where evidence of bygone food traditions and histories will be saved for future generations.

Food museums are also places where people, especially students and children, can connect with food. Most people live in urban or suburban settings and have no opportunity to see food production in gardens, farms or ranches. Outdoor food markets have dwindled. Busy families either eat fast food out, or convenience food in, and seldom dine together. One consequence of these factors may well be the rising obesity rates among many people, including children, in the developed world.

Food-focused museums help people develop different attitudes about food and their dietary choices. Educational outreach programs that extend and expand school curriculum help students to take a new look at food.

While numerous interesting and important farm and agriculture history museums exist, these concentrate on the machinery and mechanics of bygone food production. There is concern that these rural arts institutions aren't having as strong an impact on a modern pop culture-oriented public as they once did.

Museums devoted to eating and specific foods can be dynamic and up-to-date. Witness the Japanese approach. Japan has developed a series of urban food theme park museums that are packing in young and old.

Museums of Food, Museums of War

"History celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the plowed fields whereby we thrive.  It knows the names of the kings' bastards but cannot tell us the origin of wheat.  This is the way of human folly."---J. H. Fabre, (1823-1915)

Very few museums are dedicated to the subject of food preparation and eating. Is this possibly because nourishment has been mainly a female activity? Until recently domestic subjects have taken a back seat to the more traditional male pursuits of war, weapons, battles, political and natural histories.

We love museums of any kind. Material evidence of wars, weapons and battles are extensive and inherently visual and interesting. Simply put, there's a lot of stuff to collect and put on display. (This might also account for the numerous agriculture and farm related museums and exhibits. Old farm gear and equipment abound.)

Some would argue that the proliferation of museums and exhibits with militant subjects is just another example of the power of the military-industrial complex that US President Eisenhower, a former Army general himself, warned against. Military might and expertise is a dominant topic in US society.

The Florida State Fair in Tampa is an interesting example. State fairs are traditionally agrarian showcases. Farm animals, produce and traditions are featured. The Florida State Fair is no exception. Its "Cracker Country" is a permanent assemblage of 19th and early 20th century farm buildings and rural town businesses. Volunteers in period costumes portray rural life and arts. Yet---out in the main part of the fair, seemingly out of place, but nevertheless quite impressive, was an entire military museum! The Armed Forces Military Museum had set up camp--complete with a display-filled trailer, tent, tanks, anti-aircraft guns, a huge model of a battleship--the works.

However gripping military museums may be, we are advocating that equal attention be devoted to the subject of sustenance--what we eat and how and why we eat it. One need look no further than the United States' own National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian to understand how overlooked is the story of the nation's foods.

Rio Rancho, the fastest growing city in New Mexico, a place that hardly existed 30 years ago, despite the fact that its very name and history is food related, has decided that it needs to do something to put itself on the cultural map. To develop community pride it has announced plans to create the largest military museum in the southwestern part of the USA.

Museums/USA keeps a directory of the nation's museums, broken down into categories and by individual states. California, a world food production center and culinary mecca, has only one institution devoted to food. COPIA, in Napa, identifies itself as a center exhibiting wine and food art with no permanent collections. ( California has several museums dedicated to farm heritage, as well as museums of off-beat subjects such as skateboards and strippers. )

Museums USA has twenty-four museum categories including one for "military." There are no categories for food or agriculture.

15,403 Museums

149 military museums

Musee, an online directory of the world's museums is divided into 126 categories, including listings for food, drink, agriculture and military museums.

37,000 museums

1,200 military museums

722 agriculture museums
131 specialty food museums
70 beverage museums
only
7 museums about food and eating

The Food Subject As Entertainment

The Land Pavilions at Walt Disney World's Epcot Center in Florida and now in California's Disneyland are consistently some of the most popular Disney attractions. Visitors can see lettuces, tomatoes, and cucumbers growing hydroponically in greenhouses demonstrating intensive farming systems. The Land Pavilions also generate a large volume of follow-up inquiries from visitors. It's no mystery why. We all eat, and we're interested in food. And food is entertaining.

In the early 1990's we were guest curators of two food-related exhibits running simultaneously in the national museums of Canada and the United States. Our collections and research illustrating the history of the potato were the basis of "The Amazing Potato" exhibition at Canada's National Museum of Technology in Ottawa. ( Interestingly, the Canadian public, when surveyed regarding a new exhibition, picked first "food," and then "the potato" over all other topics.) The exhibition, planned to run a year,was extended for two more years. Our collections on the potato and corn were key components of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History's "Seeds of Change" exhibition at the time of the Quincentenary of the Columbus voyage to the Western Hemisphere. Visitor surveys indicated that these food-related exhibits were some of the most popular in each museum's history.

People are fascinated with the story of food. We've been presenting programs and exhibits on the history of the foods we eat for over a quarter of a century and the feedback we get is always the same. Whenever we do a program for kids in a library, for instance, pretty soon a lot of adults are standing in the back taking in the program.

What we find compelling are exhibits and information that feature the foods themselves. The kinds of art and artifacts we at The FOOD Museum have collected over the years from around the world intrigue and capture the attention of our audiences young and old, in person or online.

And while we personally enjoy farm and agriculture museums, these mostly concentrate on bygone technologies and feature old machinery and kitchen items. Even enlivened with demonstrations of rural arts such as horse shoeing, blacksmithing, cooking, and so on, these museums are discovering that their audiences have become so familiar with these activities they are less likely to visit again.

We have exuberant visions for a museum, maybe more than one, about food and eating. In the meantime, we continue to develop The FOOD Museum Online, while we seek a permanent home for the collection, its library, archives and programs.

And we continue to promote the establishment of more museums and exhibits about food and eating. We welcome your comments and suggestions. Contact us.

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