Well, what a week.
I have not forgotten about you! I am sorry for this delay again, I have just been quite busy, and frankly have not taken the time to properly write. And let me tell you: I miss it! Greatly. I long for the days when I will be able to just write. Write all day, about anything and everything. Long rants, short reflections, formal essays. How fun.
Anyways, considering the chaos that continues to color - or darken - our days, I thought I would share something a little bit more fun, albeit a bit nostalgic. A Century of Dining Out: The American Story in Menus, 1841-1941 is a digital catalog of menus recovered from various periods in American history from The Great Depression to the Gilded Age and Jazz Age. As a design student who is fascinated by the meaning and story behind seemingly mundane everyday objects - and not to mention someone who is interested in food as a cultural and social mechanism - this particular archive drew my attention. What could the humble menu reveal about American life, if anything? What could it say about our culture? About how people lived, thought, connected? Menus are something we used to interact with frequently, and I am not just referring to the physical printed menus from restaurants or bars, but also digital menus, menus posted on screens, walls, and otherwise more “implied” menus. They’re something most of us probably don’t think twice about; we use them transactionally, so we most certainly never think about them as designed or artful objects. This exhibition reminded me of this fact: the objects that surround us are not just given - they don’t just magically appear. They are designed and thought out. Granted, some are more aesthetically pleasing than others, but that does not diminish the act of creation that lies within.
What’s more, I think it is an interesting time to be looking back at the history of menus, not just because we now live in the covid era - where restrictions on dining out come and go in flux - but because menus are unique revelatory emblems of a distinct American way of life, a way of life that seems irrelevant now. Or maybe not? The concept of dining out is not American by all means, but this particular archive guides us through fluctuations of the US’ cultural, social, and political life in a way I have not seen before; through a very narrow but paradoxically eye-opening lens. Menus are, at their most basic level of existence, purely functional objects. They present us with a list of choices; we read them, then select. Simple, right? But often what goes into that selection - the designing, the creating, the using - carries a lot more meaning than we are conscious of. Meanings about ourselves, our identities, our way of life, and by extent society’s too. So, as the US is undergoing a strange and tumultuous time, I think it is not only interesting but important to look back at this aspect of society. To quote from the site,
Menus are minor, transient documents that tell us how people have dined outside the home over time. […] They aid our cultural memory by providing historical evidence, not only of what people were eating, but what else they were doing and with whom they were doing it; and what they valued.
How can The American Story in Menus inform us today? What can we learn from it, and that could potentially help us?
“The menu is an art form that aims to please. While most were intended for short-term use and not meant to be saved, others were finely crafted by high-society stationers such as Tiffany's and Dempsey & Carroll. Even when kept as personal mementos, however, they were frequently discarded by later generations for whom they had no special meaning. As with other types of ephemera, part of their appeal lies within the notion of their improbable survival.”