13、Museum café can be a lecture room - Delicious dishes are starting point for Biodiversity Education

 

Daisuke　SAKUMA

Osaka Museum of Natural History

 

In 2010, the UN Conference on Biodiversity COP10 announced 20 new action targets to be attained by 2020, known as the Aichi Biodiversity Targets. The first target is to make people aware of the value of biodiversity and sustainability. However, in urban areas, people hardly recognized the value of biodiversity in their daily life. Museums, especially Natural History Museums can be a good provider of biodiversity education programs, but these tend to be “biology” programs rather than life-connected programs. So we optimized the opportunity to use the museum café or restaurant and serve visitors good dishes while curators of art and history museums as well as natural history museums give presentations. Lectures include stories of agriculture, fishery, the history of fishery, mycology, pottery art and so on. Cuisine can be a good companion textbook for promoting the relationship between culture and biodiversity. Audiences can communicate with curators in a relaxed atmosphere, so that lecture-concepts are understood easily, just like table talk. These lectures are broadcasted and recorded on the Ustream, utilized for further self-education and dietary education in schools.