There’s a Sex Museum in New York, but what’s to honor that other favorite metropolitan pastime? No, not baseball–FOOD! Doesn’t the city’s ebullient foodie community deserve a place to park its passion? Already graced by unusual, specialized museums devoted to such things as tenements and the subway, how could The Big Apple (of all places) not give a nod to nourishment? It may soon have the Museum of Food and Drink. That is, if culinary curators Dave Arnold and Peter J. Kim raise enough money ($80K) to open MOFAD’s first exhibit in New York City, designed to raise interest in the bigger project–a permanent home. The current plan is to open with a boom, literally. The museum’s first exhibit is a giant 3,000 pound Puffing Gun–what Kellogg’s and Quaker originally used in the early 1900s to spin and heat up the nation’s supply of Cheerios, Kix, and Puffed Rice. (Note: Today, Americans eat nearly 3 billion boxes of breakfast cereal a year.)
BOOM! The Puffing Gun: With the $80k, MOFAD plans to mount its custom-made puffing gun onto a flatbed trailer and take it to the streets, parks, and schools where students and citizens will get to see how cereal used to be made. (Hey, U2 launched an album riding through New York on the back of a flatbed; it works.) Food is a pretty darn good idea for a museum–everybody has an interest in it (sort of like the subject of that first museum we mentioned). One thing’s for sure: at MOFAD, the restaurant will have to be glorious.
A rendering of a potential future home for MOFAD.