Food History

My family and I visited the Museum of Melbourne the other day. I’ve been mulling over the visit: it left me with a great deal to think about.

Melbourne today is a great food-loving city. You’ve seen some of it in this blog: I’ve given you home recipes from Anglo-Jewish Melbourne; I’ve talked about shifts in Australian cuisine; I’ve talked about iceboxes - though I forgot to explain how kids whose families only needed half a block raced after the iceman to pick up the shavings and chips that scattered in his wake.

What I did at the Museum was try to see what the Museum specialists made of it all. My nieces helped me with the detective work and I suspect there’s more than one post in it. Our big discovery is that the Museum doesn’t integrate food with the rest of life very comfortably. It’s a dimension that exists, but is only partly-explored.

Little snippets emerge from the explanations to displays. In the 1870s, for instance, Victorians drank five times more spirits than today, but less beer and less wine.

These snippets are unsatisfying. What sort of spirits did they drink? How much did the spirits cost? Was the drinking the same in all social groups? When were spirits drunk? There’s a big difference between a drink after work with friends and a late night drink with your spouse. Speaking of spouses, did women drink as much as men? Did they drink in the same places as men? How did women’s and men’s drinking operate socially?

If the Museum had answered these questions, we would have begun to get a better understanding of what drinking meant to people who lived in Victoria in the 1970s. As it is, the single statistic blinds us. We think we know something, but the knowledge isn’t enough to help us understand people and their lives.

The Museum has a set from the TV show, Neighbours. A complete kitchen. My mother looked at it and compared the appliances one after the other with her own kitchen. Lots of similarities. The big difference is that nothing’s operational - no wear and tear showing usage patterns. No almost-invisible stains from the enthusiastic efforts of children cooking or worn patches from a favourite cup being put back in the one spot time after time after time for forty years. The only almost-food in the kitchen is in the refrigerator. That food is the wedding cake from the famous Kylie wedding episode.

The kitchen is all stage props. Very good stage props. It has the air of reality. But if you had to use that kitchen, you would starve. If you rely on the food history the Museum presents, you will glean some interesting data but you won’t get a good understanding of how Melbourne became what it is, foodwise. Snippets of history. Not nearly enough of the richness of human lives for my personal happiness.

Tomorrow I’m going to Victoria Market. Food history central. Vic Market is an old covered market that changes subtly each generation to meet current needs. Maybe I’ll find more there.