‘Our Global Kitchen,’ at American Museum of Natural History - NYTimes.com by Vanessa Lacayo

‘Our Global Kitchen,’ at American Museum of Natural History - NYTimes.com

12/8/12 6:07 PM

November 23, 2012

A Feast With a World of Ingredients By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

On Thanksgiving weekend, the subject of food is slightly risky. Bringing it up may be like going to a supermarket after a gargantuan dinner and finding that everything on display is unappealing. But a visit to the new exhibition “Our Global Kitchen: Food, Nature, Culture” at the American Museum of Natural History should quickly revive the intellectual appetite. And it certainly feeds an urge to invoke food metaphors, so here goes: This is an ambitious feast of a show, with offerings for every taste, even the most exotic. It is robustly prepared and imaginatively served, with memorable moments in each course. The two main chefs — Eleanor J. Sterling, the director of the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the museum, and Mark A. Norell, the chairman of the division of paleontology — might be challenged over some of their seasonings and pairings. But by the time you digest the piquant offerings and reach the lightweight, multiculti dessert — a film about how different cultures associate food and festivals — you are left ... well, not hungry for more, but with a more expansive stance for interpreting the world and a weightier understanding of your place within it. O.K., enough. Food imagery comes so easily because eating, as we are reminded here again and again, is so fundamental. Four trillion dollars’ worth of food is bought and sold globally each year; two billion tons of corn, rice and wheat were produced in 2010. The exhibition embraces the sheer immensity of its subject, including food’s waste (some 30 percent globally); absence (hunger afflicts 870 million people, or 1 in 8); and variety (from genetically modified Iowa corn to the 18foot-tall hydroponic vertical growing system created by Windowfarms in Brooklyn). We see salted sea urchins and eggs in pine-nut sauce as they might have been served to Livia Drusilla, wife of Emperor Augustus in ancient Rome. In an elaborately detailed diorama of an Aztec market, a basket of toasted grasshoppers is offered. One of the most important staples in tropical regions, we learn, is the cassava, whose tuberous roots are regularly savored by 900 million people. In the show’s working kitchen, a demonstration gives you a chance to chew a jelly bean while holding your nose; release your fingers, and the bland taste is transformed into ripe cherry by http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/24/arts/design/our-global-kitchen-at…ican-museum-of-natural-history.html?pagewanted=all&pagewanted=print

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‘Our Global Kitchen,’ at American Museum of Natural History - NYTimes.com

12/8/12 6:07 PM

vapors surprisingly entering the nose from the throat. And throughout, there is a lot of sniffing: push buttons for puffs of popcorn, chocolate, lavender, fennel and thyme. A marvel of miscellany is offered here: cats can’t taste sweets, and birds can’t taste the spice of chili peppers; more Brazilian sugar is used for biofuels than for edibles; watermelons are grown in Japan in glass containers that shape them into cubes; a farm of 200,000 salmon produces as much fecal waste as a town of 20,000 to 60,000 people. (A touch-screen tabletop video display shows how to prepare grilled salmon, which must be a form of revenge.) What do Australians love for breakfast? Vegemite (a spread of yeast extract and vegetables). What was the diet of a man found mummified in the Alps 5,000 years after his death? Meat (probably ibex, judging from 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 kind of breakfast that the swimming champion Michael Phelps typically ate as a teenager, vividly modeled here: a five-egg omelet, a bowl of oatmeal, a stack of syrup-drenched pancakes, three egg sandwiches and two slices of French toast. And no one who learns about Scoville Heat Units, or SHUs, which “tell you how much sugar water needs to be added to a ground-up pepper until its heat can’t be tasted,” will ever again insist that jalapeños are spicy. Their SHU is between 2,500 and 5,000. Thai green peppers come in at 60,000 to 70,000. And in Trinidad a pepper variety has a Scoville measurement of up to two million units. But apart from the many startling details, there is a larger theme running through the show, about how cultures transform nature, and how, in recent years, those transformations may have gone awry. At the beginning, we learn that almost no naturally grown food has been free from human domestication. Wild berries are typically much smaller than those we regularly eat because, generally, larger ones have been selected for cultivation. This practice of selective genetic modification is ancient. Over the centuries a single species of wild cabbage, Brassica oleracea, has been selectively bred to create brussels sprouts, kale, broccoli, cauliflower and kohlrabi. Potatoes, we learn, were poisonous before peoples in the Andes transformed them into edible crops some 7,000 to 10,000 years ago. And Herodotus, in his travels nearly 2,500 years ago, saw sheep bred to have delectable tails so large they had to be dragged around in carts. In contemporary times, similar procedures have led to chickens that produce more eggs, tomatoes http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/24/arts/design/our-global-kitchen-at…ican-museum-of-natural-history.html?pagewanted=all&pagewanted=print

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‘Our Global Kitchen,’ at American Museum of Natural History - NYTimes.com

12/8/12 6:07 PM

with hard skins for easier trucking, and the ever-shrinking Atlantic cod, which, unlike berries, have had their largest representatives fished out of the gene pool, leaving smaller cod to reproduce. In the late 19th century, cod were typically over six feet long; in the 1980s, 18 inches. How are we to analyze how current agricultural approaches differ from past practices? The issue is recurrent here, and concerns are prominent. Are they exaggerated? Genetic manipulation is certainly cutting corners on traditional breeding. But contemporary errors in breeding and overfarming also tend to loom large, while past struggles, misconceptions and disasters are forgotten. Yet the contemporary scene here inspires wariness. Great opportunities are promised from farming technologies: half of all fish and shellfish now eaten are products of “aquaculture.” But we also learn of the dangers of restricting diversity, leaving crops more vulnerable. (A single fungus attacked a single breed of potato, creating the devastating 19th-century famine in Ireland.) Now, bananas, “the most popular fruit in the world,” almost all come from a single genetic group, and they, too, are threatened by a fungus. “Bye-bye, Bananas?” reads the label. Diversity is celebrated here for many reasons — not just in foods, but also in the cultures that cook, serve and modify them. A display shows how consistently some dishes have been prepared over the centuries in countries like China, Morocco and Korea. A section on cookbooks includes “Norwegian Food Traditions,” “Simply Lebanese” and “Sylvia’s Soul Food.” But that cultural diversity also faces a rough time in the global kitchen: 26 percent of the world’s packaged foods are manufactured by just 10 companies. In fact, modernity — in particular, American agricultural modernity — also seems to produce a callow form of waste. An enormous transparent container, here filled with what appears to be refuse, suggests the amount of food thrown out by a typical American family of four every year: 1,656 pounds. An adjacent display compares the waste of higher-income and lower-income countries, pointing out intriguing differences. But in general, we learn, the wealthy waste out of spoiled carelessness (like discarding imperfect crops or being rigid about expiration dates), the poor out of needy inadequacy (a lack of refrigeration or decent roads). In a survey of the global food economy, though, this example seems selected primarily to reinforce a simple, somewhat clichéd admonition. And, yes, a figure of 30 percent waste worldwide is sobering. But other aspects are left unexplored. How, for example, does agricultural aid from wealthier countries fit into the picture? According to http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/24/arts/design/our-global-kitchen-at…ican-museum-of-natural-history.html?pagewanted=all&pagewanted=print

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‘Our Global Kitchen,’ at American Museum of Natural History - NYTimes.com

12/8/12 6:07 PM

government statistics, for example, the federal Agriculture Department gave $16 billion to needier nations during the decade ending in 2009. The nature of food exports and imports might have been explored as well. (The United States, we learn, was the world’s largest exporter of food by a factor of nearly two in 2009, while also being the world’s fourth-largest importer.) The waste example illustrates how ecologically themed issues can displace others in science museums. And some weighty conclusions are offered without sufficient evidence. In a brief video here, “Future of Food,” scientists suggest that contemporary agriculture contributes to global warming. The curator Dr. Sterling says (as does the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization) that 18 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases come from the raising of livestock for consumption. Two advisers to the World Bank have gone further, arguing for a figure of 51 percent, which would mean that the Kyoto Protocol might have been more profitably concerned with vegetarianism than with fossil fuels. But this exhibition is too diverse and rich to settle for a simple message. And while more anthropological depth would have been welcome — perhaps suggesting how a particular culture’s culinary preparation can be understood as part of its wider systems of belief — on the whole this is a splendid repast. “Our Global Kitchen” is on view through Aug. 11 at the American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West and 79th Street; (212) 769-5100, amnh.org.