FOOD: Transforming the American Table, 1950–2000: National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Abstract

From farmers� markets to the Food Network, from the emergence of Michael Pollan as a household name to the proliferation of food studies programs, publications, and standing-room-only conference sessions, popular and scholarly interest in food appears insatiable. It is fitting, then, that food is the subject of a new exhibition at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. (fig. 1). FOOD: Transforming the American Table, 1950�2000 opened to the public in November 2012 and is scheduled to remain on display through 2015. The strengths of food as a subject for a historical museum are the same as those that have led to its popularity among scholars, writers, and the public. Food is elemental, one of the main ways we connect to the world around us. On our plates, the labors of those who till the soil become our sustenance. Eating is also a highly personal act, an expression of social and cultural values, ethnic traditions, regional differences, and national identity. By using food to tell the story of life in the United States since 1950, the exhibition�s curators draw connections among a number of historical topics: technological changes and environmental transformations, shifts in rural livelihoods and suburban lifestyles, the health and labor of producers and consumers, and profound social and cultural shifts whose effects continue to reverberate.