Toidukultuur Hiiumaa Muuseumis: kogumine, uurimine, vahendamine
Authors: Põllo Helgi 
Published: January 2019

Alimentary Culture at Hiiumaa Museum: Collection, Research, Exhibition and Outreach

We have reached an age when museums’ collections, having rapidly increased in size, require substantive discussion on the need to continue acquisitions. Increasingly often we also encounter the question of whether cultural history museums that chronicle everyday life should devote more attention to aspects that affect practically all people, such as the topic of food and eating. We would do well to consider Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. To this point, museums’ focus has been more on art, achievements or decidedly material aspects. The article provides a concise overview of what the Hiiumaa Museum has been up to in the context of food and eating over its 50-year history. In the years following the establishment of the museum, attention in both exhibitions and collections was focused mainly on the tableware and utensils used for consumption or preservation of food, most of which originated in the 19th century. As time went on, activities were characterized by an increasing element of play enriched with knowledge (Soviet-era New Year’s exhibitions, “baron’s days”, Christmaslands and other visitor-oriented programmes). The exhibitions themselves grew and changed, even if their titles remained simple: Millest räägivad nõud? (What does tableware have to say? 2000) or Köök (Kitchen, 2015). Over the years, the museum became a place to spend free time in, but also turned into a centre of expertise for the small local community on the matter of regional food traditions. This need for better knowledge on the subject also spurred the development of the museum’s own research, surveys, and documentary efforts. As one example, we can cite the recorded responses to the question “What foods were on your Christmas table?”, around the time of the first free Christmas celebrations in 1990. A problem related to the food topic, revealed during the preparation of the Hiiumaa compilation in 2015, was the paucity (or at least the one-dimensional nature) of images in the museum’s collections.
As the museum grew and life changed, new programmatic events such as salon evenings and café days were devised. All these major undertakings required volunteer assistance, because the museum’s own small team was not capable of covering the staffing needs of all these events. Outreach with students took place in all age groups – from nursery school to secondary school. Some of the assignments in the popular cooperation project involving upper secondary schoolers, “Becoming a Hiiumaa islander through tradition”, also tied in with food. The more stringent food safety codes of more recent years have reduced the museum’s possibilities for actually handing food or serving it to visitors. Still, a thing or two has changed over time, and in 2015, we organized a black pudding and white pudding preparation workshop in the museum’s classroom. As interest in the food topic has risen among the locals and Estonia-wide, new topics keep on accruing in the museum’s research sphere: e.g., drying of sheepshanks, making of head cheese. The best and most characteristic examples make their way, with the museum’s help, on to the UNESCO list of intangible heritage, but above all, they end up in the local museum’s collections. Certainly many important topics require much analysis within the museum to make better sense of acquisition policies as well as the museum’s mission and role in society as a whole. Once again, taking up the topic of food and eating has given impetus for this process.