Prepare to feel nauseous at this School Dinners exhibition
If your stomach turns when you walk past a Japanese restaurant with moulded plastic replicas of sushi on display, prepare to feel even more nauseous in the School Dinners exhibition at the Food Museum in Stowmarket, Suffolk. Here, moulded in that same plastic, in (if anything) even more garish colours, you'll see a sample two-course school dinner from each decade from the 1940s to the 2020s. If orange PVC cod's roe looks a bit disgusting, a heap of pale, lumpy, plastic 1970s mashed potato with over-boiled carrots is even worse.
The sample plate from the 1940s contains chunks of dark brown liver polluting the inside of a jacket potato. (I'm not sure dinner ladies would have put liver inside a jacket potato in the 1940s.) The 1970s beige spam fritters look like flaccid inflatable beds. By the 1980s, the plastic flight tray had come into fashion, so while eating their greasy sausages with mash and peas, children were distracted by the chocolate sponge with pink custard in a separate division of the same receptacle. By the 1990s the turkey twizzler was ruining children's health, resting on a bed of vomity 'mixed vegetables' (carrot cubes, peas and sweetcorn) with, again, the scoop of mash which, in plastic form, looks like vanilla ice cream. By comparison, the lentil dahl of the 2020s, with rice, sweetcorn and a small flatbread, followed by fruit salad and a pot of yoghurt, looks bearable.
Beware the onslaught of wall prose. I go to an exhibition to look at items, not to read wall prose. When you enter the exhibition, housed (appropriately) in the Bone Building on the glorious 84-acre site of the Food Museum – which used to be the Museum of East Anglian life but was rebranded in 2022 – you're accosted by bite-size chunks of educational prose lining every wall.
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