About The National Food Museum

Everyone Eats

And when we’re not eating, we’re often thinking about our next snack or meal. Eating is one of life’s great pleasures, especially when we share a table with family or friends. The National Food Museum will celebrate and explore the extraordinary power of food to bring people together to nourish our lives and our planet while examining the effects of how food is grown, produced, and processed.

The National Food Museum is the first nationally significant museum to explore America and Americans through the lens of food: what we eat, what influences our food choices, and how food affects our health and the environment. Working in collaboration with a team of curators, educators, designers, culinary historians, environment experts, and climate visionaries, the National Food Museum creates and produces traveling and online exhibitions and public programs that reach visitors in Washington, DC, across the country, and beyond. As we work to secure a permanent physical home, the National Food Museum is committed to presenting interactive and experiential learning that brings the flavor of food to life while making connections for visitors between the food they eat and the impact of those choices on themselves and our planet.

The Museum's Goals

A world where food and how it is grown contribute to healthy people, a sustainable planet, and a more vibrant culture.

To Inform

Connect visitors to food through timely and relatable information, innovative presentations, and creative storytelling: past, present, and future.

To Promote

Promote critical thinking about food’s impact on health and wellbeing, the environment, social equity, global and domestic hunger, and how the food industry and politics affect America’s food system and what we eat.

To Encourage

Encourage engagement in local, national, or global efforts to influence food-related change.

A peek into the future National Food Museum

Eating is an essential, integral part of who we are as individuals, as families, as societies, and as humans. Yet, until now, there has not been a national gathering space dedicated to this most fundamental element of our lives. The National Food Museum is such a space, offering guests of all ages an opportunity to celebrate the pleasures of food, its history and significance, its effect on the environment, and on our own bodies. Finally, the table is set for visitors to engage in a lively conversation about the foods we love and the ways food impacts our lives and our planet.