NEW YORK — The first show at the Museum of Food and Drink’s new home in Brooklyn is “Flavor: Making It and Faking It,” and it wastes no time in getting to the point.
“What makes your favorite food so delicious?” the text on a large free-standing panel near the entrance asks. The one-word answer: “Chemicals.”
The word is deflating. It’s a little like being told that the human soul has a specific atomic weight. Chemicals? Yuck.
But maybe not. Flavors come in two varieties, natural and artificial, but what do the words really mean? This is the looming question in an exhibition about food and culture that opens next Wednesday, in a museum that until now has been a free-floating idea rather than a building with an address. The show follows the history of lab-created flavors from the middle of the 19th century, when German scientists created artificial vanilla, to the present day, when the culinary spin doctors known as flavorists tweak and blend the myriad tastes found in virtually every food product on supermarket shelves.
Flavor is a complex, beguiling subject. At one of several “smell machines” throughout the exhibition, where specific aromas are emitted through silver hoses at the push of a button, visitors learn that coffee gets a little lift — the je ne sais quoi that makes it irresistible in the morning — from a sulfur compound also found in skunk spray. Tiny edible pellets distributed from gumball machines send the message in tactile form. This is an exhibition that is not just hands-on, but tongue-on and nostrils-on.
Vanilla, originally a rare and highly expensive flavor extracted from the bean of a Mexican orchid, became a standard ingredient in ordinary households when organic chemists found that they could summon forth its chemical twin, vanillin, from pine bark. Further experiments showed that it could be found in the petrochemical compound guaiacol, in clove oil, in paper waste and in rice bran.
About a decade ago, scientists discovered that the lignin in cow dung could yield vanillin, a breakthrough that food manufacturers have not exactly trumpeted. The Food and Drug Administration has taken note, however. As one of the exhibition’s wall panel explains, reassuringly, “Vanillin made in this way cannot be labeled natural, because cow dung is not considered edible.”
The point is, vanillin made in a lab is chemically identical to the vanillin produced in a vanilla bean, just as Dolly the sheep was genetically identical to the donor sheep that supplied her DNA. Another flavor component, citral, makes lemons taste lemony. The citral in lemons is chemically the same as citral derived from lemongrass and lemon myrtle, both of which are labeled “natural.”
The list goes on and on. There are thousands of lab-created flavor compounds identical to their natural counterparts, which leads to a series of existential questions and conceptual opposites embedded in the discourse here: natural versus artificial, authentic versus ersatz, pure versus adulterated.
“Flavor” ponders all of these as it guides viewers through the mysteries of the human tongue and its 10,000 taste receptors, the dark arts of the flavorists, and the chemical replication of “umami,” the Japanese concept often translated as “deliciousness,” in monosodium glutamate, or MSG.
In the end, it all comes down to flavor and aroma, both of which the exhibition offers in abundance. At stops along the way, the complexities of flavors and their infinite variants are illustrated at the strawberry smell machine, the cola smell machine, the coffee smell machine and a Wurlitzer-like console, the Smell Synth, that allows visitors to mix 19 aroma compounds in any combination.
The Smell Synth is alluring. The flavors cover a wide range, from sweet and fruity to downright obnoxious. The British have put most of them on potato chips. But not “cheesy, vomit” or “nail polish remover.” Combine them with “boozy” and you have an aroma redolent of late Saturday nights and bad life choices.
The Museum of Food and Drink began when Dave Arnold, a former sculptor with an MFA from Columbia and an obsession with food history and kitchen equipment, set up a small exhibition on country ham in donated space at the Javits Convention Center during the 2005 Fancy Food Show. Arnold wanted to trace the history of the product, and to position it as an American answer to the artisanal prosciutto of Italy, or Spain’s celebrated jamón Ibérico.
The display caught the eye of Michael Batterberry, then editor of Food Arts, who invited Arnold to write for the magazine. An interest in food science led Arnold to create the Department of Culinary Technology at the French Culinary Institute, and he soon began thinking of a museum that would tackle the history and culture of food. New York had a museum of sex. What about the other great primal urge?
Peter Kim, a young lawyer who attended a fundraising theme dinner that Arnold arranged at the Manhattan restaurant Del Posto, also liked the idea, so much so that he left his law firm and began working with Arnold and is now the museum’s executive director.
Together, with money from a Kickstarter campaign, the two men organized “Boom!: The Puffing Gun and the Rise of Cereal,” which opened in 2013 as part of the annual Summer Streets Festival in New York and traveled around the city. The centerpiece was a 3,200-pound cannon of the type that companies like General Mills and Kellogg once used to transform grain into Cheerios, Trix and puffed rice.
Arnold and Kim recently took out a five-year lease on the first floor of a former parking garage across from McCarren Park, on the border between Greenpoint and Williamsburg. The Mofad Lab, as it has been named, will be the site of special exhibitions until that far-off day — Kim estimates that it might be 40 years from now — when a full-scale Museum of Food and Drink becomes a reality.
“Why is it that no one can do it?” Arnold asked in a recent telephone interview. “Because to do it right you need a budget of $800 million and a building the size of the American Museum of Natural History or the Met. No one’s going to write that check. So we’re going to pretend that the great museum exists, but we just put on special exhibitions.”
The current exhibition, which runs through February, reflects the museum founder’s nonjudgmental philosophy of taking the food world as they find it. “This is what people eat,” Arnold said. “This is how the food system works. It’s important to talk about.”
Additional Information:
“Flavor: Making It and Faking It” opens next Wednesday and runs through Feb. 29 at the Museum of Food and Drink, 62 Bayard St., Brooklyn; mofad.org.
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