Food, Foodies, and Museum Visitors

All of us at Reach Advisors love food.  We are members of community supported agriculture programs, get milk from our local dairies via milkmen, and one of us even has chickens. 

We've been wondering if there was any kind of correlation between museum-going and, for lack of a better word, foodieism.  And so, over the past several surveys we have run, we've been peppering in food-related questions to find out. 

Fortunately, one of our clients, the Atlanta History Center, has generously allowed us to share some of our findings, which we have done via AAM's Center for the Future of Museums blog.  Click here to check it out.

And if this whets your appetite, check out their one-day Feeding the Spirit symposium on food, museums, and communities, being held October 13 in Pittsburgh.  It's a great lineup of fascinating topics - you'll come away fully sated.

(Apologies for the food puns.  We couldn't help ourselves!)

Comments

[Dan]

Further confirmation of your poll back in 6/24/08 (http://reachadvisors.typepad.com/museum_audience_insight/2008/06/top-ten-no-fourteen-list-of-interpretation-preferences.html) where the #5 and #1 preferred interpretations were making and tasting historical foods. And it certainly backs up what we see when we're doing historical interpreting (http://www.celticclans.org/re-livinghistory/?p=313)

It's good to see that some historical museums are starting to catch on. Colonial Williamsburg has a historic foods blog, Hancock Shaker Village offers classes in horticulture, Sturbridge village has special events where the patrons can cook and eat a 19th C. meal.

[Michelle Moon]

We need to more tightly link foodways, history, and place. And to do that, we need to assert some will - there are all kinds of legal and licensing issues with allowing food preparation and tasting in museums, and we need to find work-arounds. Then, too, curatorial practices that aim for maximum protection and preservation often prevent the use of food in historic spaces or around accessioned objects.

I think these realities has done more to limit or curtail food programming than any other concern. There's no lack of interest, and we ignore the world of food to our detriment. Certainly in my own history museum experience, visitors have rarely enjoyed anything more than garden- and kitchen-based food programs, and they retain guests so long that deep interpretive interactions - far beyond any others that take place in a historic house - are possible. There are solutions, but they can be tricky. At my museum, we're currently contracting with one of our approved caterers to prepare cookies from a historic recipe from one of our historic houses. These cookies are delivered to us pre-packaged, and we present them as a 'surprise' outside the exit at the end of the tour. As you can imagine, it's very much appreciated - but we want to find ways to do more!