The participative exhibition Beurk! Yuck! Igitt! The food we love to hate is based on stories the visitors shared on the museum’s designated website about the food they loathe. The Museum has taken this panoply of material to present an interactive and engaging contemplation of the emotion of disgust, analysing it from cultural, religious, social, historical and scientific aspects.
In 1825, the French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826) wrote “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.” With the exhibition, the Alimentarium takes the opposite approach to this now famous adage. Its new temporary exhibition, the first to be based on an emotion, explores food disgust by endeavouring to address the saying “Tell me what you don’t eat, and I will tell you what you are.”
In December 2019, Alimentarium set up a specific platform, inviting online visitors worldwide to share their thoughts on the food they find revolting. Their stories served as the basis for the exhibition. Visitors are invited to dive into the history of favourite food and pet hates via interactive exhibits and demonstrations that arouse all our senses, focusing on four main aspects of this topic: biology, ethics, aesthetics, and sustainable development.