Bolus, butterflies and chocolate buttons: The British Museum of Food

A new establishment has recently appeared on the London museum scene; The British Museum of Food (BMoF), pioneered by Sam Bompas and Harry Parr. This duo of fearless food experimenters (known for their exploding wedding cakes and “jellyscapes”, featuring jellies in the form of St Paul’s Cathedral and monkey brains) have set up this new institution, currently in pop-up form in Borough Market, in the hope of establishing a permanent home.  Spread across a handful of rooms, the museum’s interactive exhibits explore aspects of food not so commonly discussed in popular culture, including the experience of digestion, the impact of sound on taste, the importance of insects and the social history of menus. Through the work of the museum, which they hope will one day become a ‘globally recognised national resource’, they aspire to ‘change peoples’ lives by helping them consider what they eat and to spread knowledge around nutrition and health and to recognise its role in culture’.

True to its motto (From Field to Table, Mouth and Beyond) the museum excels in helping to change our perception of food. After all, no single aspect of society would be possible without food, and in our era of mass-produced, highly processed and easily accessible grub it is all too easy to forget the huge journey undergone by each ingredient before it reaches our fork. BMoF capitalises on this in The Butterfly Effect – a room transformed with humidifiers, heaters and foliage into a tropical butterfly house. The room, tinged with pink and blue, has something ethereal about it; warm mist drifts from the humidifiers, while multi-hued butterflies flutter overhead or pause on leaves. Though it feels like you’ve inadvertently strayed into Kew Gardens, the exhibit has an important message about the origin of our food (the pollination of plants by butterflies is crucial), and the importance of protecting wildlife in order to sustain this food.

A tiny tropical paradise, with the bustle of Borough Market just visible beyond. 

To help support declining butterfly populations, BMoF’s experts recommend  leaving out pieces
 of overripe fruit, as butterflies enjoy sucking the sweet juice.

The British Menu Archive is a brilliant reminder that we can study history through the unlikeliest of objects. After all, if there are museums filled with historical furniture, why not fill one with menus? Not only do they function as fascinating historical evidence about diets of the past (remember when everything fancy used to be French?), a menu represents attitudes towards social, and specifically, high class eating. The documents on display are both informative and decorative objects; the designs from elegant establishments are lavish and exquisite, while the meal plan from HMP Cardiff is a bald spreadsheet, complete with utilitarian colour coding and misspellings. The exhibit also presents menus kept as mementos; one tattered example from the Ritz in 1907 is covered in scrawling signatures (including one from a certain Winston Churchill), while another, a perfectly preserved slip no bigger than a receipt, lists the dishes featured at a Jewish wedding in 1947, paid for solely by ration coupons. Apparently it took Bompas and Parr over a year and a half to collect them all; here’s hoping they can dig up even more for a permanent museum.

Bompas and Parr have made a name for themselves through their innovative mix of science and food to create alternative, immersive experiences (such as their famous gin cocktail mists). In BMoF they’ve gone a step further, with Be The Bolus (the ball of masticated food that makes its way from mouth to stomach, and also, curiously, a form of Dutch pastry, that looks horribly similar to the former definition) which is a truly interactive experience of digestion. You enter a darkened room, remove your shoes, and settle yourself into a luxurious red leather massage chair. Bompas and Parr appear on screen (looking like a cross between Jedward and a modern Willy Wonka) and explain that you’re about to follow the progress of a camera pill through an undisclosed victim’s digestive tract. And what’s more, the massage chair has been programmed to simulate the motions of the gut, so you feel like you’re being digested too. The effect is remarkable. If you can take your mind off the fact that your body is being pummeled in many strange, and not altogether comfortable, ways and focus on the film, you can learn some pretty interesting facts. Did you know that the sensation of butterflies in the stomach is due of a lack of oxygen? Were you aware that the tissue contained in the average intestine, when hypothetically flattened out, would cover the area of a tennis court? Not for the easily-queasy, the exhibit certainly lives up to Bompas and Parr’s commitment to examining food from all, err, angles.

Inside Choco-phonica

Thankfully, the next exhibit features free chocolate. As part of a collaboration with prolific Oxford professor Charles Spence, BMoF invites visitors to take part in a scientific experiment on taste. Choco-phonica involves stepping into four booths that project different sounds, eating a chocolate button, and then describing how it tastes. The sounds range from the swosh and hiss of waves breaking on a beach, to the squeals of children at play and to the mechanical thudding of a machine. And the chocolate really does taste different in each. This is a brilliant way of introducing visitors to the science of taste, which goes well beyond the tongue. Sounds, smells and surroundings are proven to affect taste; apparently the white noise on a plane contributes to the blandness of airline food, a heavier container makes yoghurt seem more filling, and tea obviously never tastes the same when not drunk from your favourite mug. The exhibit serves as a reminder that we interact with food on many more levels than we consider, and is an extremely palatable introduction to this fascinating science. 

Participants in the experiment are asked to rate the sweetness and creaminess of the chocolate 

  

With its winding staircase adorned with unusual foodie artwork (including a knitted full English and a banana on fire) Bompas and Parr have succeeded in creating a museum that is as colourful and wacky as their clothing, and as fiercely intelligent as they. They are determined for the museum to be a permanent feature, and why not? After all, Britain has museums for pencils and lawnmowers (which, I believe, have a relatively straightforward history and application), but nothing dedicated to food, possibly the most important and multi-faceted element of human society. And seeing as people are talking about food more than ever before, is it surely not about time a museum was created to champion its history, present and future? Bompas and Parr have created a fascinating snapshot of what such a museum could be like; one that draws together geography, anthropology, social history and technology in order to offer visitors a greater understanding of food. “Do we need a museum of food?” is BMoF’s  final question to visitors. The answer? An unequivocal YES.  

Let's get a permanent one!

The British Museum of Food is open for three months. Standard entry costs £5. Find out more at www.bmof.org.uk

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