Weekend reading: Food and Museums

Nina Levent and Irina D. Mihalache, editors.  Food and Museums.  Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.

I love food collections in museums, the quirkier the better.  Happily for me, there are lots of them.

This book collects articles by various authors about their involvement with museum food collections all over the world.

I’ve seen some of the ones discussed here and even written about a couple of them.  I especially loved the collection of cup tops at the Smithsonian and the sugar cubes at Nestlé’s museum in Vevey.

The book organizes the articles into sections on interdisciplinary perspectives, collecting and exhibiting, engaging audiences, eating in museums, and food and art.

It does not seem to have anything on the spectacular food exhibit run in connection with the Milan Food Expo a few years ago—a disappointment.

But the articles are fun to read, make me wish I had been able to go to all the exhibits, and should inspire other museums to start collecting food objects.