Our Global Kitchen, the American Museum of Natural History’s new temporary exhibit on food, is a splendid feast indeed, filled with many intriguing tidbits arranged in a beautifully crafted space. The museum has really brought out the fine china, so to speak, and if perhaps it is too much to fully digest, you will still come out well-contented and needing to loosen a belt buckle.
Now that the obligatory food metaphors are dispensed with, let’s get to the crux of the matter: this is one of the most aesthetically pleasing exhibits AMNH has ever made. The walls are vibrant hues of green and red, the displays filled with glittering utensils and a thousand charming gimmicks abound: this exhibit was one of the first I’ve seen to make worthwhile scent interactives, including smells of chocolate, cinnamon and various herbs. (Smelling the garlic, however, was tempting fate.) For the opening movies, which were bordered on the left by a row of hydroponic plants, I sat on a chair shaped like a strawberry, which, though trivial, enriched the experience.
The exhibit is best on its small details, which are often quirky and unexpected: square watermelons made in Japan, the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion (a pepper with a 2,000,000 Scoville index—jalapenos have at most a 5,000 rating) and ice cream molded to look like Jane Austen. The set pieces are also well-made, including items like Farm Set, an art installation by Pascal Bernier depicting infinite chickens in a mirror box to wittily illustrate the factory-style raising of livestock, and an interactive table with videos of food preparation which, while not particularly informative, are pleasing to the eye.
In the big picture, however, Our Global Kitchen may have bit off more than it can chew. The exhibit is a whopping 30,000 words long, comprising five different sections—growing, transporting, cooking, eating and celebrating—with many different moral messages, from the unsustainability of the modern farming system to food as cultural expression to rises in obesity. I normally like to read through exhibits nearly word for word, but there was so much information that I felt hard-pressed to do more than skim most sections. Picking out the quirky gems from the glut of information was easy enough, but I felt a little ungrounded and voyeuristic without a connection to overarching themes.
The interactives also left a slightly bitter taste in my mouth. In the kitchen, the primary attraction of the exhibit, I ate a bitter flavor strip and a jellybean while a twenty something lazily explained the science behind the detection of bitterness and the connection between taste and smell. Pleasant enough, but using the entirety of the enormous kitchen for such a small activity felt like overkill. I was also the only person besides the staffer in the kitchen, so while I wanted to explore the additional information scattered around the edges of the room, I was stuck listening to my guide’s five-minute spiel. I did, however, come near the end of the day on a Monday, so the kitchen was likely at low capacity. There is no justification, however, for the interactive that displays Instagrams of meals sent by visitors to the museum’s account. There were enough people taking filtered pictures of their Thai food before AMNH decided to encourage them.
Our Global Kitchen, however, is still an aesthetically pleasing and informative exhibit, and the only complaint is that it could have been better. If we are clamoring for seconds, it must mean that what we have on our plate is pretty damn good.