MOHAI’s Exhibit on Seattle’s Food History Has Arrived

Cramming the vast and unwieldy topic of Seattle’s food into a museum exhibition space can’t be easy. There’s everything from geoduck to Rainier cherries, our coffee history, Pike Place Market, commercial fishing—even the rise of sous vide. Not to mention the restaurants.

The Museum of History and Industry put this massive topic in the capable hands of Rebekah Denn, about as esteemed a food writer and food champion as you can find in this town. The result is an expedition through various facets of food culture. Edible City: A Delicious Journey^[1] opens Saturday, November 19 with an entire day of programming^[2].

MOHAI recreated Canlis’s Table No. 1, complete with a few dresses midcentury Seattle women actually wore to dine there—curatorial catnip for anyone who loves the Smithsonian’s collection of First Lady gowns. The city’s first espresso cart is on display, next to a few bottles of Mazagran, a bottled, carbonated coffee soda Starbucks developed with Pepsi in the mid-90s (spoiler: it was a flop). I knew that Cinnabon originated here, but the story of its quest for the proper spice profile is a cool detail, one that now won’t be lost to history. I didn’t know about Colonel Sanders’s Seattle sojourn. Or that Julia Child’s love of the Cuisinart helped put Sur La Table on the national culinary map back when the cooking shop in Pike Place Market was the only place on the West Coast to get one.

Not that this exhibit is all about brands and big names. Or even all about dining. Spend time reading Denn’s captions and you’ll come away with a better understanding of how the resources around us shaped Seattle’s food culture, and vice versa.

Edible City runs through September 10, 2017.

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References

1. ^{^} Edible City: A Delicious Journey (ediblecity.mohai.org)
2. ^{^} an entire day of programming (www.mohai.org)
3. ^{^} App Store (itunes.apple.com)
4. ^{^} Google Play (play.google.com)