The new exhibition at the Jewish Museum of Maryland, Chosen Food: Cuisine, Culture and American Jewish Identity, is not a full-course examination of what has traveled down the Jewish-American gullet. It is, rather, an appetizer plate, heaped with tantalizing tidbits. The visitor learns, for instance, that 86 percent of kosher-food consumers aren’t observant Jews; that, in 1935, at the request of a Georgia rabbi, Coca-Cola substituted cottonseed for beef tallow glycerin in its famous secret recipe; that when Iranian Jews immigrated to the United States, dried limes were so central to their cuisine they brought them in their pockets.

“We cover a lot of big things, but we’re not trying to be the encyclopedia,” Jewish Museum of Maryland Executive Director Avi Decter says. “You couldn’t do it.” Instead, the exhibit is a survey of what American Jews in all their diversity eat now, with enough historical information to explain how that came to be. Emphasis is placed on the global nature of Jewish cuisine and the nearly infinite variety of interpretations it has undergone.

It’s a subject some might consider beneath scholarly dignity. The museum received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for the exhibition, and the written comments of the panelists who reviewed the application betray some skepticism, Decter says, despite the NEH’s decision to support the project.

“Every one of them began with a variation of a sentence along the lines of, ‘We thought this was a joke until we read the proposal,’” he says. “It’s culture-lite, humanities-lite.” But the museum has a history of tackling unusual subjects, such as Jewish vacationing and tchotchkes (the Yiddish word for knickknacks). “The reason nobody did it before was it was so obvious,” Decter says. “Just because it’s obvious doesn’t make it unimportant.”

Portions of the exhibition, while fun, do feel a bit light. For example, visitors can choose on a touch screen what they consider to be the “most Jewish” food represented, from a field of some 20 items. Poll results are then displayed on the screen. (On the day of the opening, matzo-ball soup was in the lead.) A section on special occasions includes a loop of home videos of various festive events—bar and bat mitzvahs, weddings—that isn’t particularly illuminating if you’re Jewish yourself, have ever attended such an occasion, or are at all culturally literate.

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