Museum shows less ordinary foods

ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News

Idaho’s Potato Museum ranks second in Skyscanner’s top 10 list of food museums.

Tourists the world over looking for sites that mixes culture and culinary delights – with a pinch of strangeness – need look no further than flight ticket finder Skyscanner’s top 10 list of weird food museums.

The number of food museums has mushroomed in recent years, with even the most unusual of food stuffs having a shrine in its honor somewhere on the planet, said Skyscanner.net in detailing its list which includes several standouts from the United States and Europe.

Last year, the website chose Japan’s proposed Cup Noodle Museum as its weirdest food museum following plans by Japanese noodle giant Nissin Foods to celebrate 50 years of the instant cup noodle by opening a museum dedicated to the snack, according to the website.

Idaho’s Potato Museum ranked second. The Idaho Potato Museum has a range of fun and educational potato-based exhibits, including the world’s largest potato chip, which measures 25 inches.

Currywurst in Berlin attracts fans of the spicy sausage who can sample a variety of different currywurst spices and blends before taking the helm at their very own currywurst snack bar. The Spam Museum in Austin, Texas, has been running for 10 years and has over 16,500 square feet of Spam-related fun and games, trivia and artifacts such as the Spam diner, and vintage Spam advertising.

Alkmaar in the Netherlands is famous for its cheese museum. The museum is located right next to Alkmaar cheese market where cheese fans are guaranteed to have a “wheely good” time as they watch expert cheese makers in action.

New York’s Jell-O Museum, celebrates the gelatinous food. The museum has its own shrine in New York which boasts a dizzying array of souvenirs plus an exhibit illustrating Jell-O spokesman Bill Cosby’s influence over 30 years.

Elsewhere, a mushroom museum in France’s Loire Valley attracts mushroom lovers, exhibiting a variety of wild and unusual mushrooms that are available to try.

The Mount Horeb Mustard Museum in Wisconsin has 5,000 jars, bottles and tubes of the yellow stuff on display.

Italy’s Musee dell Olivo, an olive oil museum, showcases the role the olive tree has played in over 6,000 years of civilization; visitors can also wander the nearby olive groves and olive mill to see how the oil is produced.

One of the most interesting food museums is Virginia’s Burnt Food Museum.

This intimate museum celebrates the beauty in what most people would consider the ultimate culinary catastrophe with a series of frazzled artifacts carefully prepared by curator Deborah Henson-Conant.