'Food: The Nature of Eating' Exhibit Now At The Nature Museum

By Melissa Wiley in Food on Mar 28, 2013 3:40PM

“Farm to table” is more than a cute catchphrase. It’s a laborious reality still far removed from too many urbanites’ organic salads and vichyssoise. It’s also only half the story, as “Food: The Nature of Eating,” the new exhibit at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, clearly demonstrates. The real locavore movement originated, we all know, with agriculture’s colonization of the Illinois prairie, a fact so axiomatic it's worth revisiting as you amble past a backlit stuffed buffalo before approaching a truck bed inseminated with tomato trellises.

Yes, you could easily fly through the display panels in a few short minutes, but you owe it to yourself and the food that sustains you to take your time to absorb some sense of the journey many common products make before roosting inside your fridge or cupboard. Wild Alaskan salmon, as we read on a bright pink placard, travels to China for filleting — by hand — before being shipped back to U.S. markets, racking up 11,000 miles before returning stateside.

Although the exhibition is manifestly geared toward little ones (i.e. tunnels in mock Chicago Stockyards that we couldn’t squeeze into, even while holding our breath), it deserves a thoughtful browse before you get your flutter on at the neighboring Butterfly Haven. It also just might complicate your notion of whether “slow food” can sometimes be a little too slow while giving greater meaning to how long the distance from farm to table actually is.

The Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum is located at 2430 N Cannon Dr.