Knowledge Quarter Private View: Feeding the 400

When: Thursday, 3 November 2016 from 09:00 to 10:00
Where: The Foundling Museum, 40 Brunswick Square, London

The Knowledge Quarter is delighted to invite staff and friends from Knowledge Quarter organisations to the next in our series of private breakfast views. It will be on this occasion hosted at the Foundling Museum. KQ staff and partner organisations will have the opportunity to have an exclusive look at Feeding the 400 an exhibition which considers a fundamental yet little-examined aspect of life at the Foundling Hospital – food.

Knowledge Quarter staff members can RSVP through Eventbrite. 

Based on new research, guest curator Jane Levi presents the multi-faceted impact that food and eating regimes had on children at the Hospital from 1740 to 1950. This fascinating story is explored through art, archival material, photographs and the voices of former pupils, whose memories of food are captured in the Museum’s extensive sound archive.

Feeding the 400 explodes myths and misconceptions around eating at the Hospital, demonstrating how the institution’s food choices were far more than just questions of economy, nutrition and health. Working with historians, scientists and cultural practitioners, the exhibition brings alive the connections between what, when, where and why the foundlings ate what they ate; the beliefs and science that underpinned these decisions; and their physiological and psychological effects. Alongside archival material, paintings and objects including tableware from the Foundling Museum collection, a newly commissioned sound work evokes the experience of communal eating, conjuring sounds common to the Hospital’s dining rooms.