Disgusting Food Museum media mentions
The Disgusting Food Museum has been mentioned in the media many times since we opened. Below is a selection of our media mentions. Click the logo to get to the original article/video.
Articles
The Gatekeepers Who Get to Decide What Food Is “Disgusting”
On Tripadvisor, the Disgusting Food Museum is ranked No. 1 on a list of ninety-four things to do in Malmö, the third-largest city in Sweden. Visitors are often surprised to find that the museum is situated on the first floor of a shopping mall, between a furniture store and an art gallery. Daniela Nusfelean, a Romanian college student who visited the museum in January, said that one of the first things she noticed was the absence of any odor. “This place is supposed to have so much food,” Nusfelean remembered thinking. “How can food not smell?”
The idea that anything labeled “food” can be described as “disgusting” is a minefield, running up against cultural tastes and personal preferences, not to mention the shrinking ability of some countries to feed all their people.
But clearly, if every human had a cornucopia of the world’s edibles laid out on a table stretching from one end of the earth to the next, not everyone would dig enthusiastically into, say, a lamprey pie, a sliver of maggot-infested pecorino or a chunk of rotten shark meat.
In this episode of the Atlas Obscura podcast, we visit a food museum in Sweden that challenges what exactly makes something delicious … or disgusting.
It’s easy to read the museum as a culturally insensitive house of culinary horrors — people(who are not me) in places (that are not here) eat that? And sure, there’s not not a gross-out factor, as evidenced by the name. But West told me the actual mission is the opposite: By really diving into the world of disgust, he’s hoping he can change the way people eat, and maybe save the world.
Welcome to the world’s first exhibition devoted to foods that some would call revolting. The museum’s name and its contents are pretty controversial — one culture’s disgusting is another culture’s delicacy. That goes for escamoles, the tree-ant larvae eaten in Mexico, or shirako, the cod sperm eaten in Japan, or bird’s nest soup, a Chinese dish of nests made from bird saliva. The name is meant to grab visitors’ attention, but that’s the point that West says he’s trying to make: Disgust is a cultural construct.
Disgust is considered one of the basic human emotions, much like Pixar’s movie Inside Out showed us. It protects us from disease by making us avoid unsafe food— and yet while the emotion itself is universal, the food that we classify as “disgusting” is not. And that’s exactly why Swedish Samuel West and Andreas Ahrens created a museum dedicated to disgusting food from everywhere across the world.
It is a hands-on, tongues-out experience. At the Museum of Disgusting Food in Malmö, in Sweden, all the world’s great cuisines are represented. Each exhibit is considered a delicacy somewhere, but strikes many unaccustomed palates as revolting. Visitors are invited to handle a raw bull’s penis and sip liquor with dead mice in it.
The unusual attraction will exhibit some of the most divisive dishes from around the globe, from rotten shark (a delicacy in Iceland) to south-east Asia’s infamously foul-smelling durian, a type of fruit so pungent it’s banned on public transport in Singapore.
Have you come across a breathtakingly horrible food and thought ‘that belongs in a museum’? If you haven’t, that’s probably because you’ve never come across a durian. Or any of the other items belonging in the Digusting Food Museum. That’s right, there is an institution archiving all the weird and horrible foods being consumed around the world.
The name of the museum leaves little suspense on what will be there. On the menu, eighty culinary specialties that the world does not envy.
There was a time when museums were reserved for fine art and high-brow nonsense we only pretend to understand. These days, the world is full of wonderfully weird museums accessible to the everyman with everything from broken relationships and all things phallic to ramen and barbed wire. Now, Sweden is set to open one more: the world’s grossest food museum.
The main objective is to make it fun, interesting and interactive,” said West, who explains that the exhibition is quite expensive since about half of the dishes are replaced every two days.
Fermenterad isländsk surhaj, ost med larver och surkålsjuice.
Utställningen som öppnade i Malmö på onsdagen är ingen gourmetmässa – tvärtom så är det äcklet som står i fokus.
– Äckel är subjektivt. Det handlar om vad man har vuxit upp med, säger arrangören Andreas Ahrens.
Syrsor, tjurpenis och kokiss. Eller koriander, Vegimite och surströmming. Det var några av sakerna som stod på menyn när museet med världens äckligaste mat invigde sina nya lokaler på köpcentret Caroli.
Äckelmagad? Då ska du nog undvika Slagthuset i Malmö i vinter. Där visas nämligen ”världens 80 äckligaste maträtter” upp: Tjurpenis, ost med levande larver eller hákarl – isländsk surhaj.
Located in Sweden, with pop ups in France and Las Vegas, the attraction features some of the most horrifying cuisine.
While some seem fairly normal – like liquorice for example – others are pretty grotesque such as maggot-infested cheese, Thai Durian fruit and fried bat.
It’s a fun and unusual experience for both kids and adults with the possibility of challenging your own boundaries of what you consider edible.
At Disgusting Food Museum, you get to question [what we deem edible] and it might be an eye-opener, especially after the tasting session. Many people are afraid of eating unknown things like insects, but it really comes down to what’s considered edible in your culture.
Bat, sheep’s eye, bull’s penis, insects, surströmming (fermented herrings) or Kiviak (seal skin stuffed with birds), here are some of the disgusting foods which are currently presented in Nantes in the exhibition “Disgusting Food Museum”.
Mandalay Bay to Host Disgusting Food Museum (You’ve Been Warned) at October Vegas Food Expo.
The annual Vegas Food Expo (VFX) will be hosted at Mandalay Bay on the Las Vegas Strip Ocober 8-10, and new this year is an exhibition that seeks to cause revulsion and nausea in convention attendees.
The Disgusting Food Museum is bringing its exhibition of unique international culinary samplings to LA’s A+D Architecture and Design Museum from 9 December until 17 February, 2019. The museum features “the most provocative foods from around the world” in an effort to celebrate and examine how different cultures approach foods that might be considered disgusting somewhere else.
Maggot cheese and mouse wine are just some of the 80 foods on display. While many come for a shock, the museum’s director tells DW he hopes visitors will realize that disgust is in the eye — or stomach — of the beholder.
So once the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic is behind us, why not strike out to Sweden and dine on some fermented shark, maggot-infested cheese, or test your mettle with a bit of the stinkiest fruit in the world?
Fancy a bite of cheese crawling with live maggots? A bull’s penis? Some wine with dead mice floating in the bottle?
Even if you have an adventurous palate, Malmo’s Disgusting Food Museum will likely test your taste buds.
Visitors can smell and taste some of the foods, and lest you doubt that the museum means business, its tickets also double as barf bags.
Come hungry. Leave grossed out.
That’s the basic formula behind the Disgusting Food Museum, a temporary exhibit that just opened in this city’s Arts District. A large hall has been turned into an emporium of the unappetizing, culling samples of some of the world’s most offensive morsels.
The Disgusting Food Museum, which made headlines when it opened in Malmo, Sweden, in November 2018, is traveling somewhere warm for the winter — specfically, to Los Angeles.
Alongside the Sweden branch, the museum will open a three-month pop-up in downtown L.A.’s Architecture and Design Museum. It will be open Wednesday through Sunday every day from December 9 until February 17.
Bag in hand then, visitors venture off on a world tour of specialities, some of which may seem to a Western palate like ingredients in a witch’s brew but are considered delicacies.
“The Disgusting Food Museum exists to let people explore the world of food and to see both their own food and (other food) from the lens of another culture,” says Ahrens.
Most of the foods on display are real and can be smelled or tasted, but several are replicas. There are also interactive exhibits and videos.
The organisers worked with a team of researchers from Lund University to curate the culinary selection, and ordered the foods from around the world.