Donating Menus to the Southern Food and Beverage Museum

Donating Menus to the Southern Food and Beverage Museum

As a part of their research and archiving efforts, in conjunction with the University of New Orleans, they are collecting menus from every restaurant throughout the world serving an American southern-style menu. They will collect these menus annually, catalog them and have a systematically collected (and they hope thorough) database of menus. They hope that researchers in the future will be able to use this as a research tool in the future. The restaurant associations in the various states are helping in this information gathering, but you too can help.

Ask for a menu for their archive every time and everywhere you eat out whenever the food is rooted in American southern culture. Please send them those menus with the name of the restaurant and the date. They would also love menus from the past. This includes menus from special events not at restaurants, special meals for parties at restaurants and any other menu that that you might have. Send those that you can part with to us with your name, a description of the event, the date and where it took place. This is an ongoing project that can only enhance opportunities for researchers to see how important food is to our culture.

Southern Food and Beverage Museum
900 Camp St.
New Orleans, LA 70130

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Locally:

You can contribute to Chicago History Museum’s collection by donating Chicago restaurant as well as take-out menus. Please direct these to: Russell Lewis, Chief Historian, Chicago History Museum, 1601 N. Clark St., Chicago, IL 60614, Tel: 312.642.4600, e-mail: lewis@chicagohistory.org

Regards,

As great as this sounds, please, please, please don't just mail your objects to the Chicago History Museum without talking to them first. They receive tons of material and unless they can document that donations fit a particular niche, they don't collect them.

Please visit this web page first and follow their suggested procedure for donating CHM donation procedure

Did someone call for a cultural anthropologist?

Menus are documents and would be added to either archival or artifact collections depending on their projected use and how the collection is organized. Once a museum collects an object, it makes a certain level of committment regarding that object's care and use. The museum also documents that object as much as it can. A menu is nice but learning who collected it and why, what the donor knows about the restaurant or the food it served or any other detail is as important as the menu itself. Modern history museums collect stories as much as they collect stuff because the stories are what make the stuff important and interesting and a reflection of the society that created the stuff.

Don't be surprised if your donation offer is countered with a whole bunch of questions before the museum says "Thanks"

Diannie,

I did talk to Russell Lewis first before this was issued. I will be surprised actually if anyone does donate anything to either museum, but it doesn't hurt to ask.

Regards,

Cathy2

Thanks for sharing that. I know from personal experience how difficult it can be to handle tons of undocumented donations and I was just hoping to head off a potential flood.

Diannie

Diannie,

I know what you mean. The director of the local historical society tells me of bags of stuff left on the doorstep. Not often is the anonymous gift a treasure.

Regards,