FOOD: Transforming the American Table, 1950--2000: National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (2013)
The strengths of food as a subject for a historical museum are the same as those that have led to its popularity among scholars, writers, and the public.2 Food is elemental, one of the main ways we connect to the world [End Page 947] around us. On our plates, the labors of those who till the soil become our sustenance. Eating is also a highly personal act, an expression of social and cultural values, ethnic traditions, regional differences, and national identity. By using food to tell the story of life in the United States since 1950, the exhibition's curators draw connections among a number of historical topics: technological changes and environmental transformations, shifts in rural livelihoods and suburban lifestyles, the health and labor of producers and consumers, and profound social and cultural shifts whose effects continue to reverberate. Click for larger view Fig 1. At the entrance to FOOD, visitors get their first peek into Julia Child's kitchen, and learn that, Between 1950 and 2000, new technologies and cultural changes transformed how and what we eat. (Source: National Museum of American History. Reprinted with permission.) The choice of time period strengthens the exhibition in two main ways. First, it constrains what could otherwise be a sprawling narrative, by focusing on an interval of immense changes in the way Americans raised and consumed their food, marked primarily by standardized products, new distribution networks, and increased processing. Indeed, one might argue that, until the postwar era, a truly national food system and diet did not exist. Second, focusing on the recent past allows FOOD to examine transformations that most adult visitors have lived through. By using familiar objects and recognizable meals to tell a larger history of technological and social change, FOOD gives visitors the opportunity to place their own recollections in historical context and to participate in intergenerational storytelling, as older visitors share their memories with younger companions.
...MoreDescription Review of the Smithsonian exbibit of the same name.
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