McWilliams/Food Rules, 9. Boundaries, Bitters, and Puffing Guns: The Sensorial Unmaking of the Food Museum

This paper explores the challenges facing three American museums incorporating food content into their initiatives: the FOOD exhibition at the National Museum of American History (NMAH) in Washington, D.C., the Southern Food & Beverage Museum (SOFAB) in New Orleans, and the Museum of Food and Drink (MOFAD) in New York City. These museums offer distinct approaches to presenting, celebrating, and interrogating larger patterns in American food, often bending the rules of conventional pedagogy, playing with spatial, sensorial, and discursive modes. As food-focused content in museums becomes more popular, these case studies demonstrate the pedagogical expansiveness that ‘exhibiting’ food can offer.