Taste-Full Museum

Definition

The taste-full museum is Irina D. Mihalache's field (named in her essay "Taste-Full Museums," 2014, quoted in Brown) and the gustatory register of the multisensory museum: the museum that treats food and taste not as refreshment or as depicted subject but as exhibit-medium — "food's own materiality as an object with educational potential has rarely been explored." Kirsten Brown's chapter supplies the wiki's account of its two built forms and its interpretive claim.

The museum cafe as museological space. The common cafe "has begun to undergo reinterpretation as an integral contributor to meaningful engagement with a museum's subject matter": the exemplary case is the Mitsitam Native Foods Cafe (National Museum of the American Indian, Washington DC) — mitsitam, "Let's eat!" in the Delaware and Piscataway languages — whose five food stations "depict regional lifeways related to cooking techniques, ingredients, and flavors found in both traditional and contemporary Native dishes" (maple-brined turkey/Northern Woodlands; chicken tamale/South America; cedar-planked salmon/Northwest Coast; tacos/Meso America; the Indian taco/Great Plains), with a custom-built fire pit for cooking demonstrations. The dining interior itself is curated: curvilinear forms and vertical cedar paneling "evoking wind-sculpted rock formations and dense forests," designed "in an ongoing conversation with Native American communities from across the Western hemisphere" — Frances Hayden's formula: "The landscape flows into the building, and the environment is who we are."

The taste museum as community center. The Southern Food and Beverage Museum (New Orleans) builds the register out entirely: culinary-history galleries accompanied by "working kitchens where members of the community can partake in programming that brings the subject matter to life" — "Much as the kitchen is the social center of the home, the kitchen is also the social center of the Southern Food and Beverage Museum" — enacting Hollein's museum-restructuring thesis and the museum's role in community identity.

The concept's interpretive claim spans both: restaurants are "an extension of the museological space with the ability to 'educate and encourage visitors to think reflectively about what they eat and how their taste constructs stereotypes and ideas about other communities and cultures'"; taste "can be educated by the self and by the larger social, political, and cultural contexts" (Mihalache); and at the chapter's close, taste "bridges the gap between personal experiences – each of us tastes food differently and intimately at a biological level – and collective meanings and values."

Key Thinkers

• Irina D. Mihalache — the concept's author ("Taste-Full Museums," in The Multisensory Museum, 2014): food's unexplored educational materiality, the reflective-eating programme, taste's social education; not yet paged (see log).
• Kirsten Brown — the wiki's transmitting source: the Mitsitam and Southern F&B cases, the kitchen-as-social-center formula, and the taste-bridge claim.
• Hans Hollein — the restructuring thesis the community-kitchen museum enacts; not yet paged (see log).
• Emily Stokes-Rees — the museum-as-identity-machine context: Brown's food museums are the community-scale counterpart of her national-scale symbiotic spaces.

Related Concepts

• Taste — the sibling concept the wiki already holds in its aesthetic register (Bourdieu's classificatory judgement, the decorator's arbiter): the taste-full museum is the gustatory root the aesthetic register grew from — taste as bodily sense and cultural education, not judgement of décor.
• Multisensory Museum — the parent paradigm: the taste register is one of its three sense-programmes.
• Symbiotic Spaces — the institutional mechanism: museum, community, cuisine and interior in mutual benefit (the NMAI's consultative representation; the Southern F&B's community identity).
• Memory — taste's cognitive medium: ingredients and recipes "serve as hallmarks of culture and identity, evoking memories of people, places, and experiences."
• Dining Room — the domestic ancestor: Eastlake's dining-room codes are the taste-full museum's interior precedent at domestic scale — the room where taste is performed socially.
• Participatory Museum — the frame: eating is the visitor's participatory act ("the overall museum experience becomes more participatory, multisensorial, and more engaging").

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Touch, Taste, Smell (Brown 2018) — the concept's wiki source: Mihalache's thesis quoted; the Mitsitam Native Foods Cafe (stations, fire pit, consultative interior); the Southern Food and Beverage Museum (working kitchens, community identity); the reflective-eating and taste-bridge claims.

Open Questions

• Can a cafe represent a people without reducing them to menu? The Mitsitam's five stations "depict regional lifeways" — but the museum-restaurant also feeds (and prices) culture; where is the line between foodways education and consumable stereotype — the very line Mihalache's "how their taste constructs stereotypes and ideas about other communities" invokes?
• Is the community kitchen a museum programme or a replacement of the museum? The Southern F&B's kitchens "bring the subject matter to life" — but if the kitchen is the institution's "social center," what remains of the collection-centered museum Hollein said was "being restructured"?
• Taste is the one sense the visitor consumes — the exhibit is destroyed in its use. Does the taste-full museum therefore have a different temporality (daily renewal, seasonal menus) than the preservation-centered museum — and what does that do to the collection's authority?