The organic movement & the public culture of science, 1985-2025

Project overview, aims and objectives

This Collaborative Doctoral Partnership (CDP) project will partner the Science Museum, with the University of Nottingham and be funded by the Science Museums and Archives Consortium. It will examine how the organic movement has been relayed and received through cultural media across the period, with a focus on Science Museum galleries and exhibitions.

A key objective of this CDA will be a collecting project integrated into the research methodology and questions, investigating how a science museum should represent the organic food phenomenon. In conjunction with this museological study, the project will uncover how key science-related food controversies and crises, such as BSE, GM, lab-cultured meat, shaped and were shaped by the organic food movement through the archives of the institutions that played key roles in these, such as the Royal Society, the Food Standards Agency, the Soil Association, and the Organic Research Centre. It will also trace how Science Museum galleries and exhibitions engaged with such controversies.

The aim of the project is to advance understanding of the communication and public reception of the food system from an environmental perspective, providing insights into the role of museums and their collections in shaping dialogue on this crucial topic.

The project's combined historical and museological research will make an original and significant contribution to multiple academic fields, as well as museum practice, regarding the understudied organic movement, which is now making a global resurgence under the banner of agroecology as a leading answer in scientific, policy and social circles to the environmental crisis facing our current industrial food system.

The project's lead supervisors will be Professor David Matless and Dr Rupert Cole (Curator of Chemistry, Science Museum), with Dr Susanne Seymour and Dr Helen Peavitt (Curator, Science Museum) acting as secondary supervisors. The project's indicative research questions:

How has the organic movement been represented in museum exhibitions and other cultural media about food and farming, since 1985?

How have museum professionals (e.g. curators, interpretation staff etc) conceived of, and approached in relation to display, organic food & farming?

What role have institutions, such as the Royal Society, Soil Association, and the Organic Research Centre, played in shaping public discourse around organic food and its relationship to science?

How have science-related food controversies and crises (e.g. BSE crisis, GM food, lab-cultured meat) interacted with the organic movement in UK food culture? Has the movement become more mainstream or accepted in the scientific community in the period? How should a science museum link collecting and display technique to represent the organic food movement?

Research context

The historiography of the organic movement has predominantly focussed on organic farming, rather than its associated food culture, although questions of health and diet have been important for the movement since its inception. This project aims to historicise organic food culture, drawing on concepts from cultural geography, museum studies, and science and technology studies.

The recent history of the organic movement, post-1995, has had relatively little coverage, Philip Conford's standard histories stopping at this date. The project will take the story of the organic movement into the 21st century, and will be unique in exploring its recent, turbulent relationship with the scientific establishment. Interestingly, in recent years, it has found some acceptance in establishment science, a shift the project would seek to understand.