Upcoming exhibition at the Food Museum

Our food and nutrition experts in our Food and Nutrition National Bioscience Research Infrastructure (FN NBRI) team are currently working with the Food Museum on an exciting upcoming exhibition about the history of school dinners.

The Food Museum is the UK’s only museum dedicated to food. Located in Stowmarket the museum connects people with where our food comes from and the impact of our choices: past, present and future. They explore themes connected by food – social, historical, technological, industrial, environmental – and to give visitors hands-on experiences which bring processes alive, teach skills and share memories.

They are planning an upcoming exhibition on school dinners over the decades. The initial idea for the exhibition was explored by an i-teams project from students at the University of East Anglia. As part of the i-teams projects the students worked with our Food and Nutrition experts and the Food Museum to research and give an overview of the history and nutrition of school dinners. 

How you can help

Though we have some broad ideas of how foods within school dinners might have changed, we currently don’t have detailed data to work out how the levels of nutrients have changed.

Now, our food and nutrition experts are looking to delve deeper and get a better picture of how nutrition has changed over the years, and they need your help.

In order for our team to understand how nutrition has changed, they need school menus to accurately model how our nutritional intake has changed.

We are particularly looking for any school menus or recipe books that you may have lurking in your loft or cupboards that are from the 1940s onwards.

Our food and nutrition experts will then use these menus along with their Composition of foods integrated dataset (CoFID), which brings together all available data as a single dataset, to learn how the nutrition of school meals and the types of meals that are served has changed throughout the decades.

They’ll be looking at how the amount of key nutrients such as fibre, protein and vitamins has changed to help us answer the question ‘were school meals really healthier in the past?’

The data on how the nutrition of school meals has changed will be used in the upcoming exhibition at the Food Museum due to open in March 2025. Once open, school groups will be invited to come and explore how dinners have changed over the years, with visitors of all ages able to reminisce about their favourite, or not-so-favourite school food experiences.

• If you have a school menu to share contact us

Food and Nutrition National Bioscience Research Infrastrucutre

Here at the Quadram Institute we are home to a key national capability which documents and provides important data on food and nutrition.

When you’ve been to the supermarket you have probably noticed the labels detailing the nutritional content of food. Much of this data comes from our key capability, known as the Food and Nutrition National Bioscience Research Infrastructure (FN- NBRI).

The Food and Nutrition NBRI acts as a national coordinating hub, actively engaging and collaborating nationally and internationally with strategic partners and research communities and informing government policy around diet and health.