‘All that is valuable will decay’
Anyone who wants to know more about the cultures of the world has to start with food.
Food is deeply rooted in every culture. Any meal is a crossroads of rituals and traditions that connect people and distinguish cultures.
The FoodMuseum collects and presents food in a cultural context. It tells the stories behind objects and traditions from different perspectives: historical, ethnological and gastronomical. From age-old Chinese traditions to part-time vegetarianism, from Dutch herring to Moroccan pastry, from edible clay to seacucumbers: food turns out to be a unique entrance to identity and diversity within a country, a city or a neighbourhood.
The museum initiates projects and exhibitions and co-operates with museums, (private) collections and projects.
Nothing is fixed and frozen in the FoodMuseum. It grows organically, depending on chance encounters and whatever actuality throws at us.
Concept and design:
Linda Roodenburg (www.lindaroodenburg.com)
IT: Olivier Hokke (www.wolfox.nl)
address: www.foodmuseum.nl
contact: info@foodmuseum.nl
The FoodMuseum was founded in 2012 as a project of the Madame Jeanet Foundation.
Interested in cooperation with the FoodMuseum related to your project or collection?
The options are limitless in time and space.
Please contact:
info@foodmuseum.nl
or
info@lindaroodenburg.com
Ötzi the Iceman
A last meal far away from the table.
In 1991, a pair of hikers in the Italian Alps discovered the mummy of a man exposed by a retreating glacier in the border area between Italy and Austria. The discovery was an archaeological sensation. Due to the 5300 years the mummy had been laying in the snow and ice, the body dehydrated, i.e. much of the body fluid was lost.
Most mummies were treated with substances to preserve them as part of ritual burial after their organs had been removed. Ötzi -as he came to be known- is unique in that he has been preserved almost in his entirety.
While he was crossing the Ötztal Valley Alps in South Tyrol he was murdered with an arrow in his back. Ötzi was around 45 years old then, 1.60 m tall and he would have weight about 50 kg. The events surrounding Ötzi's death are still debated. His recent wounds point to violent conflict, or may be Ötzi fled into the mountains while being hunted down. But his last meal suggests that he was well prepared for his trek.
Ötzi’s stomach wasn't where it was supposed to be. The misplaced organ eluded researchers for some 20 years. But in 2009, while looking at new radiographic scans, they finally found it—inexplicably pushed up under his ribs, where the lower lungs usually sit. What's more, it was completely full. They determined Ötzi’s final meal: dried ibex meat and fat, red deer, einkorn wheat, and traces of toxic fern.
We don't know if this was a meal on the go – this year’s theme of the Oxford Food Symposium - or not and we don’t know what provisions he carried with him either. But for sure his last meal was a meal far away from any table.
Ötzi’s mummy and his artefacts have been exhibited at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy since 1998. It is stored at -6 degrees Celsius (21.2 degrees Fahrenheit) to prevent microbial invasion.
The Ötzi you see here in the FoodMuseum is a lifelike reconstruction created by the Dutch paleo artists Alfons and Adrie Kennis on behalf of the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in 2011. Since 1988, the brothers have made numerous models of prehistoric people for museums in Europe and the USA.
Sources:
-www.iceman.it
-The Iceman’s Last meal Consisted of Fat, Wild Meat, and Cereals. In: Current Biology
Report| Volume 28, ISSUE 14, p 2348-2355. E9, July 23, 2018
-Straus, C: Ötzi by Kennis & Kennis.
In: Fleckinger, A. (ed.): Ötzi 2.0 Eine Mumie zwischen Wissenschaft, Kult und Mythos. Theiss, Stuttgart 2011 p. 96-10
