According to the New York Times, the "Museum of Food and Drink" is set to open its first brick and mortar location this fall and aims to change your thoughts on food.
A photo posted by Museum of Food and Drink (@mofad) on Sep 7, 2015 at 4:07pm PDT
The Museum of Food and Drink (Mofad Lab) will open its first permanent location on October 28 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. According to Peter Kim, museum's executive director, fun is the main approach of the museum.
This will be channelled in the debut exhibition, "Flavour: Making it and Faking It". This is said to be a multisensory take on what Kim called the little-known story of the flavour industry.
Mofad Lab will become New York's first food museum with exhibits you can eat. In their website, their mission was made known: "to change the way people think about food and inspire day-to-day curiosity about what we eat and why."
It is a non profit organization and aspires to become the global leader for food education. The laboratory will feature exhibits about the culture, history, science, production and commerce of food and drink.
According to their executive director, there isn't really a structure for what the laboratory aims to do. Other food museums feature history, objects or single type of food, like ramen for example. "But there is not a major museum that looks at food and drink writ large," he said.
Kim admitted that a fully-realized museum is still years away and what the laboratory aims for is very ambitious. Currently Mofad Lab is a 5,000 square foot space that can host one exhibit at a time. Kim compares the laboratory to a restaurant saying, "When you think of the full museum as a restaurant, Mofad Lab is a test kitchen".
Kim used to be a full-time lawyer and a part-time culinary student when he first heard Dave Arnold talk about his idea for the museum. Arnold is the culinary innovator and founder of Mofad and the museum has been in the works for more than ten years. Kim decided to quit his job and accepted the full-time responsibility of creating a museum from scratch.
In 2013, the public had a first taste of the museum with the pop exhibition "Boom! The Puffing Gun and the Rise of Cereal" at the Summer Streets Festival. The museum hopes to get a much larger permanent space in the future that can hold three shows and a restaurant.
