YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT AT EXHIBIT
A SCULPTURE SHOWS HOW MUCH FOOD FAMILIES WASTE IN A YEAR.
In a towering, transparent sculpture at the entrance of The Health Museum’s new exhibit, “Our Global Kitchen: Food, Nature, Culture,” a family can see how much food they waste in a year.
Stacked with faux fruits, veggies, cereal, bread, eggs and snacks, the cubes display the average amount of consumer waste for a family of four in the U.S. each year: 1,656 pounds. A placard warns that the visual doesn’t account for waste in restaurants and farms.
The small, traveling exhibit is based on one that debuted in New York at the American Museum of Natural History in 2012, exploring how we grow, transport, cook and eat food across the globe.
Young visitors will be drawn to a computerized table that sits at kids’ height. Using touch prompts, they can “make” recipes such as grilled salmon, peach salad or tamales.
They’ll measure spices and watch ingredients get chopped on a cutting board, then press a button to add fish to a hot grill and hear it sizzle. To make groundnut soup, a food common in African cultures, they’ll follow recipes and learn cooking terms such as why we “sweat” a vegetable.
On a wall nearby, pictures ask guests whether they’re able to identify breakfast foods common in various parts of the world, including natto in Japan (rice and fermented soybeans) or paratha in Pakistan (pan-fried flatbread).
How food sustains us
Becky Seabrook of The Health Museum says the exhibit is designed to give visitors “a greater appreciation for how interconnected we all are.”
Visitors will see pictures of families posed in front of a week’s worth of groceries in different countries and learn about diet, nutrition and caloric intake.
One application that Seabrook thinks will resonate with kids is a table set to represent what champion swimmer Michael Phelps commonly ate for breakfast as a teen working his way toward Olympics stardom. The power meal consists of three fried egg sandwiches, a five-egg omelette, French toast, grits, pancakes and two cups of coffee.
The text explains the amount of energy Phelps expended while training and contrasts it to what Mohandas Gandhi may have eaten as a youth raised in a vegetarian culture in 1880s India. He would have had choices including unleavened whole wheat bread cooked in a griddle, green vegetables, rice and chickpea-thickened kadhi.
Farming models include an interactive kiosk that allows guests to choose a crop to follow as it’s planted and transported based on climate and season.
To try growing on their own, during select museum hours, visitors can fashion used cups into a compost pot and plant basil and kale seeds to take home.
Young minds, young bodies
Sara Quinones is an early-education
private school teacher who frequently visits The Health Museum with her students. She says the lessons often spark conversation back in the classroom.
On a recent trip, her students played in the permanent Amazing Body Gallery. They crawled through a colon-shaped tunnel, stared into a large diagram of the anatomy of the eye and stepped through the brain’s two hemispheres.
The students are still talking about a lesson during which a museum representative wearing a fanny pack asked them to pull out and stretch fabric to see how long their large intestine is. The kids stretched arm to arm “to see how many little bodies it took to create an intestine,” Quinones says.
She will take her students to the new food show later this month. The interactive lessons and computer-based learning appeal to her, as do the healthful-eating principles.