our global kitchen
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12/5/12 11:04 AM‘Our Global Kitchen,’ at American Museum of Natural History - NYTimes.com
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EXHIBITION REVIEW
A Feast With a World of Ingredients‘Our Global Kitchen,’ at American Museum of Natural History
Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times
Our Global Kitchen Aztec marketplace from 1519 in this American Museum of Natural Historyshow.
By EDWARD ROTHSTEINPublished: November 23, 2012
On Thanksgiving weekend, the subject of food isslightly risky. Bringing it up may be like going toa supermarket after a gargantuan dinner andfinding that everything on display is unappealing.But a visit to the new exhibition “Our GlobalKitchen: Food, Nature, Culture” at the AmericanMuseum of Natural History should quickly revivethe intellectual appetite.
And it certainlyfeeds an urge toinvoke foodmetaphors, sohere goes:
This is anambitious feast of a show, withofferings for every taste, even the mostexotic. It is robustly prepared andimaginatively served, with memorablemoments in each course. The two mainchefs — Eleanor J. Sterling, the directorof the Center for Biodiversity andConservation at the museum, and MarkA. Norell, the chairman of the division
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12/5/12 11:04 AM‘Our Global Kitchen,’ at American Museum of Natural History - NYTimes.com
Page 2 of 4http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/24/arts/design/our-global-kitchen-at-american-museum-of-natural-history.html?ref=food
Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times
POWER BREAKFAST A typicalbreakfast of the swimming starMichael Phelps.
of paleontology — might be challengedover some of their seasonings andpairings. But by the time you digest thepiquant offerings and reach thelightweight, multiculti dessert — a filmabout how different cultures associatefood and festivals — you are left ... well,not hungry for more, but with a moreexpansive stance for interpreting theworld and a weightier understanding of
your place within it.
O.K., enough. Food imagery comes so easily because eating, as we arereminded here again and again, is so fundamental. Four trilliondollars’ worth of food is bought and sold globally each year; two billiontons of corn, rice and wheat were produced in 2010. The exhibitionembraces the sheer immensity of its subject, including food’s waste(some 30 percent globally); absence (hunger afflicts 870 millionpeople, or 1 in 8); and variety (from genetically modified Iowa corn tothe 18-foot-tall hydroponic vertical growing system created byWindowfarms in Brooklyn).
We see salted sea urchins and eggs in pine-nut sauce as they mighthave been served to Livia Drusilla, wife of Emperor Augustus inancient Rome. In an elaborately detailed diorama of an Aztec market,a basket of toasted grasshoppers is offered. One of the most importantstaples in tropical regions, we learn, is the cassava, whose tuberousroots are regularly savored by 900 million people.
In the show’s working kitchen, a demonstration gives you a chance tochew a jelly bean while holding your nose; release your fingers, andthe bland taste is transformed into ripe cherry by vapors surprisinglyentering the nose from the throat. And throughout, there is a lot ofsniffing: push buttons for puffs of popcorn, chocolate, lavender, fenneland thyme.
A marvel of miscellany is offered here: cats can’t taste sweets, andbirds can’t taste the spice of chili peppers; more Brazilian sugar is usedfor biofuels than for edibles; watermelons are grown in Japan in glasscontainers that shape them into cubes; a farm of 200,000 salmonproduces as much fecal waste as a town of 20,000 to 60,000 people.(A touch-screen tabletop video display shows how to prepare grilledsalmon, which must be a form of revenge.)
What do Australians love for breakfast? Vegemite (a spread of yeastextract and vegetables). What was the diet of a man found mummifiedin the Alps 5,000 years after his death? Meat (probably ibex, judgingfrom the DNA in the preserved animal fibers); finely ground einkorn(an ancient variety of wheat, probably used in bread); and, perhaps,dried fruit.
Maybe he’d have fared better when frozen if he had enjoyed the kindof breakfast that the swimming champion Michael Phelps typically ateas a teenager, vividly modeled here: a five-egg omelet, a bowl of
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12/5/12 11:04 AM‘Our Global Kitchen,’ at American Museum of Natural History - NYTimes.com
Page 3 of 4http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/24/arts/design/our-global-kitchen-at-american-museum-of-natural-history.html?ref=food
A version of this review appeared in print on November 24, 2012, on page C1 of the New Yorkedition with the headline: A Feast With a World of Ingredients.
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Food
oatmeal, a stack of syrup-drenched pancakes, three egg sandwichesand two slices of French toast.
And no one who learns about Scoville Heat Units, or SHUs, which “tellyou how much sugar water needs to be added to a ground-up pepperuntil its heat can’t be tasted,” will ever again insist that jalapeños arespicy. Their SHU is between 2,500 and 5,000. Thai green pepperscome in at 60,000 to 70,000. And in Trinidad a pepper variety has aScoville measurement of up to two million units.
But apart from the many startling details, there is a larger themerunning through the show, about how cultures transform nature, andhow, in recent years, those transformations may have gone awry. Atthe beginning, we learn that almost no naturally grown food has beenfree from human domestication. Wild berries are typically muchsmaller than those we regularly eat because, generally, larger oneshave been selected for cultivation.
This practice of selective genetic modification is ancient. Over thecenturies a single species of wild cabbage, Brassica oleracea, has beenselectively bred to create brussels sprouts, kale, broccoli, cauliflowerand kohlrabi. Potatoes, we learn, were poisonous before peoples in theAndes transformed them into edible crops some 7,000 to 10,000 yearsago. And Herodotus, in his travels nearly 2,500 years ago, saw sheepbred to have delectable tails so large they had to be dragged around incarts.
In contemporary times, similar procedures have led to chickens thatproduce more eggs, tomatoes with hard skins for easier trucking, andthe ever-shrinking Atlantic cod, which, unlike berries, have had theirlargest representatives fished out of the gene pool, leaving smaller codto reproduce. In the late 19th century, cod were typically over six feetlong; in the 1980s, 18 inches.
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“Our Global Kitchen” is on view through Aug. 11 at the AmericanMuseum of Natural History, Central Park West and 79th Street;(212) 769-5100, amnh.org.
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