This month's museum pick...

The Field Museum

By Patrick Totty

What’s up with chocolate? Field Museum attempts an answer

After one of his patients described her recurring dream of finding a 1,000-foot-long walk-in closet filled with chocolate shoes, Freud is said to have asked, “Vutt izz itt mitt vimmin und chokolate?” It’s a question that has been echoed by people as varied as Frank Sinatra, Charlie Rose and Chicago shock jock Mancow Muller.

Speaking of Chicago, the Field Museum of Natural History currently has an exhibit on the history of chocolate that may help answer Herr Doktor Freud’s question. “Chocolate, the Exhibition,” which runs through Dec. 31, explores the genesis of womankind’s favorite flavor (menkind’s, too), from its initial cultivation in American rain forests 1,500 years ago, to its elevation to status as a sacred drink and medium of exchange among Mesoamerican Indians before Columbus, to its gradual spread throughout the world, thanks to industrialism and imaginative marketers.

The exhibition also explores contemporary uses of chocolate, people’s attitudes toward it and the myths that surround it (“it can aggravate acne,” “it can cause tooth decay,” “it’s an aphrodisiac”). Other parts of the exhibit deal with chocolate’s manufacture, recipes that use it and little-known facts, such as crucial inventions that led to the creation of candy bars and a mass market for chocolate.

Beyond the chocolate exhibition, the Field Museum offers one of the finest collections of biological and anthropological materials in the world. Founded in 1893 as a repository for artifacts on display at Chicago’s Columbian Exposition, the Field eventually became the centerpiece of a “trifecta” that’s considered to be the best museum ensemble in the U.S.: the Field itself, and the neighboring Adler Planetarium and John G. Shedd Aquarium.

A realignment of Chicago’s famous Lakeshore Drive in 1995 allowed the city to create “Museum Campus,” a 57-acre extension of  nearby Daniel Burnham Park that gave the three museums a common green space that united them in fact as well as intent.

The Field Museum’s biggest modern coup was the acquisition of Sue, the biggest, best preserved Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton ever discovered. The Field spent $8.4 million in a 1997 auction to acquire the fossil, declaring at the time that it didn’t want Sue carted off to a place where the public might never see her. Today, the museum’s 4 million annual visitors can see Sue’s 200 bones, reassembled into a magnificent skeleton more complete than any other of her species ever found. Sue lacks most of the tell-tale gaps of other museum dinosaur skeletons, with their different-colored inserts and connections between fossilized bones to show what’s missing.

Outside the Field, Museum Campus borders Lake Michigan and looks north to Chicago’s grand skyline. Skyscraper aficionados will have a new tower to look at in a couple of years, an 1,100-foot behemoth being constructed by Donald Trump. His Donaldness has already picked a daringly original name for the new highrise, which will be Chicago’s fourth tallest: Trump Tower.

The Field Museum has produced a colorful, easily navigable web site that does a thorough job of previewing the chocolate exhibition: http://www.fmnh.org/Chocolate/

The museum’s main web site is located at: http://www.fieldmuseum.org/