Food in the Library

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Got Food? Creating a Hunger Free Community
- March 28 2008
Worcester Historical Museum

The exhibit chronicles three hundred years of hunger relief efforts in Central Massachusetts. It sounds like quite an experience, according to this Worcester Telegram article.
Marking the 25th anniversary of the food bank, the exhibit takes a broad look at poverty and hunger in Massachussetts through legislation, institutions and attitudes. For example, Worcester no longer auctions off the poor for indentured servitude, as was once the case. Really a cool collaborative effort and a terrific way of inspiring reflection on and participation in an ongoing problem.

Western Kentucky mixes it up with a…with a…ok, did everyone catch that? Mixes it up…Mixes! You see, I said mixes, like cake mix, for which Duncan Hines is famous! Whew. Anyway, the library’s exhibit, Recommended by Duncan Hines, tells the story of Hines’ life and career. It’s too bad they didn’t put more exhibit content online, because folks who live far from Bowling Green are less likely to know about Hines’ fascinating career as a salesman, restaurant reviewer and author. But they did put an ad on YouTube.

UPDATE : There is a site to go with this exhibit! www.duncanhinesmuseum.com Thank you to Marissa from visitbgky.com letting me know!

Food for thought is the name of the exhibition at Jundt Museum’s Arcade Gallery
at Gonzaga University. (There’s gotta be a less clumsy way to say that.) The exhibit complements the school’s discussion theme of food, eating and agriculture. You’ve got another month to see it; it’s up November 30 2007 - March 8 2008.

They organized a pretty cool lecture series around the topic, including…

Brother David Andrews (whose bio reads like Cesar Chavez with a JD and a clerical collar) delivered the lecture Eating as a Moral Act. He also gave that talk to the 2004 Food and Society Conference, which is a Kellogg Foundation program. (I look forward to devoting a post to the Kellogg foundation, about which I know very little, except that they’ve given huge money to the School of Information at Michigan), which runs the programs in library and archives, HCI and policy. Thanks Kellogg Foundation! OK, back on track…Here’s Brother Andrews’ comments on the conference Feeding a Hungry World: The Moral Imperative of Biotechnology.

Professor Maccarone gave a talk called The Post-Industrial Eater: Aligning Ethical Values and Food Choices. I know what you’re thinking, Professor Emanuele Maccarone? The eminent Italian food chemist from the University of Catania? Author of From China to Brussels; the long path of the red oranges and Distribution of fatty acids and phytosterols as a criterion to discriminate geographic origin of pistachio seeds?! No no no, Ellen Maccarone, Professor of Philosophy at Gonzaga and author of Impartiality in moral and political philosophy. (Thanks to ISI Web of Science for making this paragraph possible.)

Zaga also screened Broken Limbs: Apples, Agriculture, and the New American Farmer Link goes to an incredible website connected with the film, with information for educators, farmers and anyone else interested. How cool!(Hey Mom, look! It’s distributed through Bullfrog Films!)

Patty Martin, Director of Washington based NGO Safe Food and Fertilizer lectured on…well, you can probably guess, and Mark Graham, author of Sustainable Agriculture: A Christian Ethic of Gratitude spoke on theology, ethics and agriculture.

The University of Pennsylvania also chose food as the subject of university-wide discussion. They picked Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma for the Penn Reading Project.
Here’s a Cool UPenn Library page with scholarly and popular resources on The Omnivore’s Dilemma and its subject matter.

I’d like to know what other schools are talking about food…

So Karl Longstreth and the crew at the University of Michigan’s Map Library take the third Thursday of the month to show off their collection, and December 2007’s exhibit was all food maps! There were dozens of maps, from local to international and from awesome to ridiculous.

I hesitate to say which I liked best; there was a stunning series of Italian regional maps. Have a look at the color in this map of Sicily! Also, check out the citrus inland and seafood around the coast. My favorite is what I’ll call trident toting cardinal mermaid (no, merman, merman!) off the southern coast. I feel like that fellow is probably some mythical symbol of whom I know nothing, but regardless, I like the cut of his jib.

Here, have a closer look at Cardinal Merman

There were wine maps and cheese maps and agriculture maps and demersal maps (kinda like this crazy demersal fish map from NASA!?!) The maps of these sea floor-hugging fish caught my eye since I’ve been reading Mark Kurlansky’s Cod.

I even made the current header for this blog from an image from this exhibit, a map of Agricultural Regions of the United States.  And a real standout among all the maps from A Cartographic Feast was the Google Maps printout Karl made that shows a major drawback of living in this part of the country, the hundreds and hundreds of miles between us and the nearest In-N-Out Burger.

The Rosenbach was awesome. I’ve been meaning to get there for a while now, because they have Joyce’s Ulysses manuscript. But I bailed on the Bloomsday shindig last time I was in Philadelphia on June 16. So before going to three of my favorite Center City Philadelphia bars, I hiked out to 20th & Delancey and took a tour. They’ve got a small Maurice Sendak exhibit up, with a much larger one going up in May. (They’re being loaned nearly 10,000 pieces of of Sendak stuff from the man himself, who has a strong relationship with the institution.)

The current exhibit is Really Rosie, and it’s great. It features the largest piece ever done by Sendak, (a wall sized drawing done for a 1980 New York Times Magazine cover), beautiful watercolor and ink pieces (rrrreally wish i had been allowed to photograph the cases), and an original score by Carole King. Really Rosie, the animated musical, is projected in the gallery. I had forgotten about Chicken Soup with Rice, but here in the Rosenbach was this amazing exhibit with paintings and songs and stories about soup!

Anyway, the Rosenbach has an incredible collection, and I love that they still function a library, and make their materials accessible to researchers. I wish I had images to show of Sir John Tenniel’s (he illustrated Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) sketch that features oysters…I also wish I had some oysters right now <sigh>.

Bought a book of recipes selected from the Rosenbach Museum and Library 1982 exhibit “Cook’s Choice: Rare and Important Cookbooks from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century”. My favorite recipe? Pesca in Gelatina, from De Honesta Voluptate et Valetudine, printed in 1475. Don’t think I’ll be using the next striped bass I catch to try it. Mostly what I like about aspic is that it makes me think of that line from Psycho, the tough detective to Norman Bates… something like, “if it doesn’t gel, it isn’t aspic. and this ain’t gellin”

Left the Rosenbach, went to three center city bars I really like; Monk’s, the Nodding Head and Ludwigs. Here’s a map of the places I went that day.