FCI and VITM-Bengaluru set up country's first food museum at Thanjavur

India's first food museum in Thanjavur takes a technological spin on its exhibits of the evolution of food and storage.
Interactive exhibits at the Thanjavur food museum. (Photo| MK Ashok Kumar, EPS)
Interactive exhibits at the Thanjavur food museum. (Photo| MK Ashok Kumar, EPS)

CHENNAI: The heritage town of Thanjavur had to be the place to herald a new slice of technological acclimatisation into the state.

With the arrival of the country’s first food museum, the town that's celebrated for its rich history, the kings of yore, the Big Temple, and arts lost and found, now has other reasons of repute too, thanks to the Food Corporation of India and Visvesvaraya Industrial & Technological Museum, Bengaluru.

The idea was to commemorate the town that hosted the first FCI office but go beyond that premise and offer a comprehensive story around the concept of food. And the results are quite fascinating. 

Set in the FCI Divisional Office at Thanjavur's Nirmala Nagar, spread over an area of 1,860 square feet, the museum takes the curious visitor on a grand tour of the evolution of food. From our species' humble origins as nomadic hunter-gatherers, it traces the advent of agriculture, the migration of food and our history of food storage.

"We started having more plant food after the advent of agriculture. This is a very interesting and intriguing scientific problem as well - why agriculture came almost contemporarily in different parts of the world. These groups were not connected; then, how is that possible? The initial part of the museum will help tell this bit," begins Manas Bagchi, curator of VITM who offered technical and conceptual support for the food museum.

Supporting the theory of agricultural societies is the display of agricultural tools recovered from these regions. 

Origins and influences

Food production is naturally followed by food storage and the museum offers models of the many ways humans adopted to handle this part of their lives.

Besides devices  from around the world (mud rhombuses of Niger or fortified fridges of Tunisia), there’s a peek into the large pits of Malwa houses of Inamgaon (one of the two main Post Harappan occupations of which only the foundational remains are available for study), palace and temple granaries, and the modern-day storage system of FCI itself.

But the subject of enormous intrigue is what comes next - our global food system. By now, we know that chillies made their way to our country through trade and transfer, that potatoes were indigenous to Peru and adopted into our cuisines much later, that tomatoes were foreign too. The food museum takes this concept a step further and maps the world’s foods.

An interactive touch sensor map provides a list of food items from a region and where they went from there. The region of South Asia boasts the presence of areca nuts, cinnamon, clover, brinjal, ginger, hempseed, lentils, mango, melons, okra and yams, among others.

While popular favourites like turmeric and sugarcane - food that’s considered quintessentially Indian — didn't make it to the board, there’s good reason for that, says Manas. "If something is quintessentially Indian, it doesn’t mean it originated in India. In 2016, there was a huge extension of the work done by Russian botanist Nikolai Vavilov (tracing centres of origin of crop plants)," he explains.

"Now, they don't say places of origin at all; it is very difficult to pinpoint that. So what they did is try to find out the origin of diversity - where the maximum diversity of that particular species is available in the wild form, it indicates that it was directed and taken to other places. We followed those papers; it is very well documented with scientific tools," he adds. 

Teeming with technology

The museum uses many technical features at its disposal to make such information interactive and fun. While the global food network map relies on touch censor, the next display breaks down the nutritional and cultural components of pulses, fruits and vegetables with the help of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID).

Pick up a mini sack of pulses or a carton of fruits and place it in the receptacle and voila! You have your FYIs on display in front of you. A food map of the country works with touch sensor again to offer two popular dishes of every state and union territory; there’s a 'making of' video for each dish on loop as well.

While Tamil Nadu's entries - thali, idli and vadai - may not be all that inspiring, it was amusing enough to find a Spice Girls reference in the note on Goa's prawn curry. The museum is set to have a virtual reality station too, to offer a 360° experience of FCI’s many works.

But given COVID regulations of sanitisation and the availability of a single VR headset, visitors will have to wait a while to enjoy this piece of tech. On the other side of the aisle, proximity sensors kick in to offer insights on the FCI's major responsibilities.

In an annexe building is a showcase of the journey of a single grain. Enumerated here with the example of paddy, it begins from the time the land is ploughed and prepared for seeding to harvest to procurement to its final leg at the PDS. 

The new era of museums

Manas believes that this museum and others, set up/managed by the National Council of Science Museums is a step towards the new era of museums across the world. "Throughout the world, the museum scene is changing a lot. There are two types of museums - one type is the storage kind where objects come with the tag 'don't touch'. Another form that started with the Exploratorium in the USA changed the concept of museums. It had to be interpretative of objects and make meaning of things. In India, NCSM has started developing this new kind of museums where technology-mediated learnings gets prominence," he points out. 

And the reception has been quite encouraging so far, a few weeks since its inauguration, notes HK Arun Prasad, from FCI's Chennai office. This might even add a new aspect to Thanjavur's tourism, it is believed. The museum is open from 11 am to 5 pm from Monday to Saturday. Entry is free. 

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