Food in museums

Ingrid Neuman <berkart<-at->earthlink<.>net> writes

>I am writing to inquire if there is an extant formal list of
>recommended (and also therefore by extension not recommended) food
>items to be served in a small museum cafe.  There has never been a
>museum cafe in-house at our museum and thus we are seeking
>recommendations, and caveats, for food products in a cafe area which
>has very close proximity to galleries within the museum.  My
>greatest concern is food debris being tracked into the nearby
>galleries unknowingly on the bottom of museum visitors' shoes for
>instance.  Has this effect ever been quantified?

In general, food in a museum is bad.  The ideal is to have any cafe
or food place associated with a museum be in a separate building.
Many museum have cafes in them anyway, for economic reasons.  If you
are forced to have a cafe in your museum, try and locate it as far
away as possible from any collection areas (galleries and stores),
and try and have physical barriers between the food spaces and the
collection areas.  Beyond that, it doesn't really matter what type
of food is involved.  As my co-worker says, "when you look at body
size, a crumb is a veritable hamburger to a mouse!"--or an insect.
Different foods (vegetables vs. meats, sugars vs. high fibre) may
attract different pests, and only some of them will be a direct
threat to collections, but all of them are an indirect threat (if
you attract one species of pest, you will also attract anything that
eats it, which in turn is more likely to be a threat to collections
once the other food has run out).

Hope that helps,

Valerie Tomlinson
Conservator
Auckland War Memorial Museum
Tamaki Paenga Hira
The Domain
Private Bag 92018
Victoria Street West
Auckland 1142
New Zealand
+64 9 306 7070 ext 7304


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                  Conservation DistList Instance 29:13
                 Distributed: Saturday, August 15, 2015
                       Message Id: cdl-29-13-002
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