If a museum wants to gain the heart and soul of a family, it’s often easier if they’ve won over their stomach first. Dea Birkett explains
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I’ve just returned from a delicious conference in Brussels on museum
and food, organized by Eetiket. Eetiket is a vibrant young
organization, dedicated to making the eating experience for families
more fun and more educational, especially in museums.
(www.eetiket.be).

Among their wonderfully simple ideas is to have
special VIP reservation cards on museum café tables, targeted
entirely at children and families. It’s just one low cost way in
which families can be made to feel welcome the minute they walk in.

I’ve always thought museums don’t make nearly enough of eating.
Everyone enjoys a good meal. And there’s rarely a collection that
doesn’t contain reference to or images of food, whether it’s Warhol’s
pop art soup cans or Cezanne’s bowls of ripening fruit. But the few
who do have food trails often begin them in one gallery and end them
in another, or even in the entrance hall. But if the aperitif to a
food trail is the café, and, after winding through several courses of
galleries, it ends up at a table there too, then you obviously
enormously increase your retail opportunities.

It’s difficult to wander into a place where people are supping and dining without wanting to do so yourself.

But museums are rather sniffy about food, as if it might leave a bad
aftertaste on their precious collection. It’s something that has to
be not only kept out of the galleries, but divorced from them. I have
yet to find – although I’m sure you’ll correct me – a museum or
gallery which has objects displayed between its café’s tables.

Of course, it used to be like this with learning centres. They’d be
tucked away in the museum basement, so the noise and dirt children
were presumed to produce wouldn’t get in the way of the serious work of the museum upstairs.

That is changing, and young people are now allowed to bring their paints, pencils and sticky fingers into more and more galleries. But last summer, wandering around one national museum with my kids, I took out a little bottle of water so they could have a cooling sip on a very hot day. The room warden swooped on us immediately; we were told quite clearly that water was not allowed in the gallery. In fact, it’s often difficult to get hold of it anywhere in a museum.

One of the 20 points on the Kids in Museums Manifesto is about providing unlimited, free tap water in a museum café, a continual plea from visitors with small children.

There are many missed opportunities for museums to make their
catering so much more than a meal. Some, such as Museums Sheffield or the British Museum have themed menus, renaming familiar food. At Sheffield’s Bugs exhibition, meatballs became ‘Dung Beetle Balls’.
For the Moctezuma exhibition, in the Court Restaurant in the British
Museum, cheddar nachos become ‘Selection of Aztec Bites’.

But is re-titling and redesigning your menu enough? How does that
really make the eating experience relate to and be part of the whole
visit? In the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington
DC, the Mitsitam Native Foods café cooks traditional Native American
food over timber fires. General Manager Larry Ponzi says, “The menu
is designed to be consistent with the mission of the museum, which is
to educate visitors about Native-American life and culture.” I wonder
how many British museum cafés are included in the museum’s mission?

Augmenting the Mitsitam’s educational mission are little ‘food facts’
left on the tables each day, such as ‘Did You Know … Chocolate
originated with the Mayas?’

It’s a simple idea to make visitors talk about what’s happening
throughout the venue. Meals, like museums, are great places to
stimulate intergenerational conversations. During the Big Lunch
initiative last summer, the Eden Project suspended giant
‘conversation starters’ from the café ceiling, prompting families to
reminisce and discuss food and where it came from.
These rare venues realize, as few in Britain do, that families are
often led by their stomachs.

As one family with young children
commented in making their nomination for this year’s Guardian Family Friendly Museum Award, “The café has to be welcoming. It’s probably the only place in the museum we’ll go to twice during one visit. Everything else we just see once.”

What a difference a café can make to a family visit became clear
during the judging process for last year’s Family Friendly Award,
when families were sent out to road test anonymously the shortlisted
museums. One large judging family went into the shortlisted Dulwich
Picture Gallery’s café, and began to move a couple of tables closer
together so they could all sit as one group. They were immediately
told they weren’t allowed to do that. The adults had to sit
separately, on different tables, each looking after some of the kids.
Dulwich Picture Gallery did not win.

The first point on the Kids in Museums Manifesto is “Be welcoming –
from the café to the curator.” If a museum wants to gain the heart
and soul of a family, it’s often easier if they’ve won over their
stomach first.

To order a free copy of the Kids in Museums Manifesto, go to
www.kidsinmuseums.org.uk.
Follow the progress of the Guardian Family Friendly Museum Award on
twitter – www.twitter.com/kidsinmuseums