We sample the topic of food: what we find in museum collections, how we can look after it, and what to look out for. We also talk wedding cake traditions, food heritage, museum cafés, and our own eating habits as museum professionals. Jenny reviews not one but TWO books on the topic and Dear Jane addresses a question about specialisms and portfolios.
00:25 Call for papers
02:14 Food we’ve seen in collections
06:47 Wedding cake traditions
10:05 Smelly finds, accessioned catastrophes, and mummy wheat
18:13 Potential resources to consult
20:18 So what is food anyway? How can we preserve (hah!) it?
27:15 Pests, mould, and why we might want to keep food
29:07 Working Victorian kitchen ranges and how food can be living history
30:50 Museum cafés and eating in museums
40:42 Staff eating habits and surveys
50:02 Review: Food and Museums
53:27 Dear Jane
57:26 Review: Modern Art Desserts – Recipes for Cakes, Cookies, Confections, and Frozen Treats Based on Iconic Works of Art
59:59 Comments, questions, corrections: food policies
Show Notes:
– Call for papers from ICON Textiles Group: https://icon.org.uk/events/call-for-papers-the-nature-of-textiles-textile-group-forum
– Object in focus: self-heating cocoa tin: https://www.spri.cam.ac.uk/museum/news/object-in-focus/2015/11/10/object-in-focus-self-heating-cocoa-tin/
– Scott’s Wedding Cake: https://www.spri.cam.ac.uk/museum/news/conservation/2014/06/19/scotts-wedding-cake/
– The Myth of Mummy Wheat: http://www.historytoday.com/gabriel-moshenska/myth-mummy-wheat
– ‘Keeping Food in Our Collections’ blog post by the Horniman Museum: http://www.horniman.ac.uk/get_involved/blog/keeping-food-in-our-collections
– Workshop for Conservation of Food Cans in Museum Collections: https://icon.org.uk/events/workshop-conservation-food-cans-in-museum-collections
– The Analysis and Treatment of Food Artifacts by Emily Hamilton: http://cool.conservation-us.org/anagpic/2011pdf/anagpic2011_Hamilton_paper.pdf
– 2014 Food in Institutions Survey Results by SPNHC: http://www.spnhc.org/media/assets/SPNHCFoodSurveyReport_2014.pdf
– List of food and beverage museums: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_food_and_beverage_museums
– World Carrot Museum: http://www.carrotmuseum.co.uk/
– Food and Museums (book): https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/food-and-museums-9781474262248/
– Modern Art Desserts (book): http://amzn.to/2ifkd8n
Hosted by Jenny Mathiasson, Kloe Rumsey, and Christina Rozeik.
Intro and outro music by DDmyzik used under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Additional sound effects and music by Calum Robertson.
Made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license.
A Wooden Dice production, 2017.