New York museum’s ‘Global Kitchen’ exhibit shows how food is farmed and people fed
March 18, 2013 | 11:49 PM
Left: A child contemplates Japanese square watermelons, which are grown by placing the young fruits in containers that force them into a square shape.
Right: Chefs at the American Museum of Natural History “Global Kitchen” exhibit teach children about the importance of smell in the tasting of food. (Jerry Hagstrom/The Hagstrom Report)
By JERRY HAGSTROM
NEW YORK CITY — As farmers and agribusiness around the country prepared to celebrate National Agriculture Day on Tuesday with the hope that children would learn more about farming, school children in the nation’s biggest city were learning Monday about food at the American Museum of Natural History, one of the world’s preeminent scientific and cultural institutions.
Opened last November, an exhibit called “Our Global Kitchen: Food, Nature, Culture” explores the ways food is produced and moved throughout the world with displays on growing, transporting, cooking, eating, tasting, and growing food.
It also features a tasting kitchen where, on Monday, children were asked to hold their noses in order to understand that smell also plays a role in determining how food tastes.
The exhibit achieves many of the goals of farmers and their leaders who complain that this generation of children does not understand farming, although some conventional producers would probably prefer a greater emphasis on biotechnology and efficiency and less emphasis on the problems caused by modern production.
“Our Global Kitchen” does not appear intended just for children, but it has clearly been planned so that they will not be bored. It explains, for example, that modern corn cobs were bred from a wild grass and that “Today’s global food economy binds us all to the 1 billion people working in agriculture, from a rice farmer in Vietnam to an oyster farmer in France.”
It also notes that chickens have been bred to lay 200 to 300 eggs per year, that strawberries have gotten bigger because farmers have planted the biggest berries over the centuries, and that in some countries where sheep’s tails are considered a delicacy, the sheep have tails so heavy that they must be carried on carts behind the live animals.
It also features historic displays of how food was eaten from ancient Rome and how laborious it was to make ice cream before the invention of electricity.
The exhibit is also very up to date, with displays on algae and quinoa, which are appreciated in some countries but just coming into focus in the United States as important sources of nutrition. It also includes an 18-foot-tall hydroponic growing system to showcase sustainable food-growing techniques and agricultural biodiversity in increasingly urban habitats.
The exhibit also discusses the possibility of raising meat in laboratories and asks whether in the future people might consume “breathable chocolate — a mist of chocolate particles that provides the flavor without the calories.”
The display is not judgmental, but it notes the differences in the eating habits of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, who consumes gargantuan protein-filled breakfasts in diners when he is training, and Indian civil rights leader Mohatmas Ghandhi, who was a vegetarian. Finally, the exhibition explores the competing issues of hunger and obesity.
In a kiosk entitled “What does food mean to you?” visitors are invited to share photos, whether of a traditional holiday dish for a family gathering or a simple meal with friends, for a chance to be featured on the Museum’s website or in the exhibit itself.
Photos may be posted on Instagram with hashtag #CelebrateFood, and should include a brief, explanatory caption.
Museum admission, including the special Global Kitchen exhibit, is $25 for adults, $14.50 for students and seniors, and $10.50 for children, but free for New York City school students and camps. The exhibit continues through August 11.
