WHY FOOD?: AN INVESTIGATION INTO PASSION AND INTEREST

A Muse Bouche | Jordan Fee

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As I close in on the end of my term as Co-Editor-in-Chief of Musings, I am beginning to reflect on just what it is about food that fascinates me. Over the course of the past two years, my thoughts and opinions on the relationship between food and museums have varied greatly. Now, at the end of my time in the Museum Studies program, I am struggling to understand how I might go on preaching about the social, political and educational value of food to groups of people who might not share the same degree of passion and interest.

When I began thinking about food and museums, it was mainly on a sensory level. While museums are generally defined by the act of looking – and in some cases, touching – I was fascinated by the concept of a multi-sensory museological experience, one that included senses like smell and taste. Local iSchool Professor Irina Miahalache’s book, Food and Museums, provided me with a great amount of reading material on this subject, and inspired me to consider how individuals outside of the museum, such as chefs and community members, could form new approaches for exhibition and interpretation. Reading about the Southern Food and Beverage Museum (SOFAB) in New Orleans and the ElBulli Foundation in Spain, my eyes were opened to an entirely new mode of thinking.

The Southern Food and Beverage Museum (Source)

Following this initial fascination with multi-sensory museum experiences, I began to notice how the educational aspects of museums can, in some ways, mirror food industry. While working at my job at a local butcher-shop, I had unique interaction with some customers that made me realize that the meanings that we assign to objects in museums are often somewhat arbitrary, and how important it is to let visitors develop their own relationships with these objects without too much intervention.

A local butcher shop in Spain (Source)

Later, I began to consider how contemporary and historic cookbooks could be used as a means for companionship and understanding between individuals, which I would argue is also one of the core tenants of contemporary museology. Since beginning my internship in the Publications department at the Art Gallery of Ontario, I have thought more and more about how art books – those fancy codices that accompany museum exhibitions – resemble cook books in their format and content. Since then,  I have since learned about companies like Figure 1 Publishing, a firm based in Vancouver which designs cook books and art books exclusively.

If you’ve read some of the more recent articles that I’ve published on Musings, you’ll have seen that my focus has not necessarily been on how to get food into the museum. There are already many individuals working hard to accomplish this task. Rather, I have been trying to show how food and reflect all aspects of our culture, from generational knowledge, to intangible heritage.

Of course, this is not to say that I don’t want to see a more literal crossover between food and museums. In my opinion, some of the most interesting museum displays in the world are food-related, such as Julia Child’s kitchen at the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum for American History. Furthermore, I believe that art can serve food in the way that it challenges our modes of perception and thinking about the world around us. 

Julia Childs Kitchen in the Smithsonian Museum of American History (Source)

Ultimately, I believe that food and museums are important to me because they point outwards. When I serve food to my friends, I am thinking not only of what is on a plate, but also about where this food came from, how it got to me, and who was affected by this process. This is something that I find myself doing whenever I am strolling around a museum; wondering where these objects came from, how they got there, and who might have played a part in this process. Unfortunately in both cases, the process may or may not be very clear, and sometimes, many individuals have been taken advantage of along the way. Still, I can’t help but seeing food and museums as vast networks of connections and relationships that extend across the globe.

While it may be cliché to say, many of us today are stuck in a culture of self-gratification. I, myself am implicated in this. However, I believe that both food and museums force us to look outwards, into the world around us, and understand that we form part of something larger. When you look at an object in a museum, try to think about all of the other objects that were not put on display, or that were sent to a different museum by a different collector. When you eat a piece of food, try to not only think about how it might taste, but also about all of the people who made it so. Focus not only on what is present, but also on what is absent. In this way, we can all become more empathetic towards both people and objects, which can only help us to become better professionals.