The brainchild of Dr Samuel West, the American behind Helsingborg’s Museum of Failure, the new exhibition will bring 80 of the world’s most disgusting foods to Slagthuset MMX just behind Malmö Central station.
“The main aim is that it is fun, interesting, and interactive,” West told The Local. “You can taste, smell, and in certain cases, even touch the food.”
The museum features a raw bull’s penis on a cutting board, maggot cheese from Sardinia, and roasted guinea pig from Peru, with visitors receiving a tour of each continent’s most unappealing offerings.
“The rotten shark from Iceland is absolutely horrid,” West said. “We have the world’s stinkiest cheese, proven by a British university. It’s hardcore science.”
But he said he hoped that the exhibition, like his failure project, would also get across a more serious point. “We need to question our ideas of disgust if we’re going to consider some of the more environmentally friendly sources of protein, like insects.”
West’s team, most of whom worked with him on the Museum of Failure, spent months working out how to contain the smell of some of the world’s stinkiest foods.
“There’s no ready-to-buy solutions for delivering nasty smells to people and trying to contain them,” West explained. “The best way is a simple medical-grade research jar.”
Containing the smell of Sweden’s fermented herring dish surströmming proved particularly difficult.
“We tested it, and tested it and were almost kicked out of our current office space because of the smell,” he said. “I think we’ve got it solved, but I’m not sure. It’s one of those things that keeps me awake at night.”
West moved to Sweden when he was 21, learned to speak Swedish within a year, and has now lived in the country for 20 years, earning a doctorate in psychology and working as an organizational psychologist.
The Museum of Failure grew out of his research into innovation and risk-taking, and brought together failed product launches from around the world, including a Trump board game.
It has been a runaway success, with franchises now opened in Toronto and Los Angeles, and another soon to open in Shanghai.
“They’re both fun, but the food museum is much more relatable and much more interactive. You can only sniff failure to a certain extent. But if you have rotten shark in your face you wish you were never born.”
The idea for the Disgusting Food Museum came out of the barrage of suggestions for new museums West has received over the last year.
“I started getting all these lists of the weirdest museums in the world,” he said. “And I thought that the only museum that I wanted to visit was the Museum of Disgusting Food.”
Initially, he intended to make the exhibit as simple and cost-effective as possible, but soon realised that for it to have maximum impact, about half of the items would have to be fresh, meaning they needed to be replenished every or every other day.
“The exhibit’s a pain in the ass, to be honest. When I was designing this, I was thinking ‘it has to be easy and economical, because I’m paying for it’. But which is more fun to look at, a plastic replica of some food or the real food in front of you? It’s just more fun to have a real durian fruit from Thailand.”
“It’s really fun and there’s a high risk of failure and if nobody shows up, I’m out a lot of money. A hell of a lot of money.”
The museum opens on October 31st and will run until the end of January.
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