ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the ways in which visitors were imagined into the Food exhibition and more generally at the process of ‘configuring the user’ in the museum context. Just how visitors are perceived, and just how the practices of exhibition-making implicate virtual – and sometimes actual – visitors, inevitably has consequences for the finished exhibition and, to varying extents, the ways in which actual visitors will relate to it. Another area of the exhibition in which the consumer focus led to a representation of food production as relatively ‘innocent’ was that concerning food poisoning. The Food exhibition, as part of the new emphasis on consumer sovereignty within public services in the UK in general and of public understanding of science approach in the Science Museum in particular, attempted to prioritise the visitor as never before. The finished exhibition had other unexpected connotations too, though, again, ones whose archaeology can be unearthed from ethnography of the making of the gallery.
