food waste sculpture photo

This sculpture contains 1,656 pounds of food waste – a year’s worth for an average American family of four, not counting food lost on farms and in processing and transportation. The sculpture is part of “Our Global Kitchen,” an exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. 

 

Courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History

If you’re in New York between now and August, you’d do well to set aside a couple of hours for “Our Global Kitchen: Food, Nature, Culture,” an ambitious and engrossing exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History.

The show, which opened in November, features everything you’d expect from one of the world’s great museums – dioramas (a 16th-century Aztec market, the dining rooms of Jane Austen and Kublai Khan), historical artifacts (cooking utensils, antique cookbooks), wall displays (the history of agriculture, foods of the future), 3-D models (square watermelons, a high-rise farm), explanatory videos (the global food system, food and ritual), interactive stations (a scent generator, a digital stovetop) and even a working kitchen.

The museum bills the exhibition as comprehensive, but of course, it isn’t. As the subtitle suggests, food intersects with so many other social and natural systems that it’s impossible to cover the territory completely. Still, the exhibition manages to touch on an impressively wide range of topics, from plant and animal breeding to farmland ecology, storage, trade, waste, hunger, obesity and the neurobiology of taste.

Several of the installations remind us how dramatically the human pursuit of food has altered the natural world. Vast tracts of land have been sculpted for farming. Forests have been razed. Rivers and lakes have been drained and diverted. Animal species have been hunted to extinction. Domestic plants and animals look nothing like their wild ancestors – and their living conditions are equally unrecognizable. 

While there’s plenty of attention to history, there’s also a thread running through the exhibition about current and future problems. Erin Betley of the museum’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation told me the curators tried not to get mired in “tar pit issues” like genetic engineering and the influence of large corporations on food and agriculture policies. But they do acknowledge the controversies. One display presents the pros and cons of various food production systems, while a talking-heads video (“Thoughts on the Future of Food”) looks at the challenge of climate change and speaks warily of quick technical fixes.

“Our Global Kitchen” is more a tasting menu than a theme meal. But it’s a filling and enriching one – and there is, I think, a carryout message. Food may be the product of enormous, complex global systems, but we all play a role. As the introductory video tells us, “What you choose to eat shapes the planet.”

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Jonathan Miller is executive director of Homelands Productions, a journalism cooperative specializing in public radio features and documentaries. As a freelance journalist, he has reported from Asia, Latin America, Africa, Europe and the U.S. for NPR, BBC, CBC, American Public Media's Marketplace, Monitor Radio, VOA, Radio Netherlands and Radio Deutsche Welle. He also has written for The New Yorker, Condé Nast Traveler, Parents, American Way, The Christian Science Monitor and many other publications. For 13 years, he lived and worked in the Philippines and Peru. 

Jon is currently serving as executive producer of "Food for 9 Billion," a collaborative project of Homelands Productions, the Center for Investigative Reporting, American Public Media's Marketplace, PRI's The World, and PBS NewsHour. He was executive producer of Homelands' award-winning "WORKING" project profiling workers in the global economy (2007-09) and the "Worlds of Difference" series about the responses of traditional societies to rapid cultural change (2002-05).