Museum of Failures

If at first you don’t succeed……

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I was surprised to recently discover, The Disgusting Food Museum in Malmö, Sweden, the brainchild of Samuel West, another psychologist, which opened in 2018. It’s a top tourist attraction where 85 culinary conundrums are on display. At the end of your visit, there is an opportunity to taste a dozen of them. Disgusting is a good term if you’re running a tourist attraction but when nearly a third of the exhibits are Asian, its critics have accused it of cultural insensitivity and racism.

That said, Lakkris Djöflar, a salty liquorice sweet, popular in Nordic countries is also included as well as a rotten fish. Once and only once, I had the pleasure of trying the liquorice sweet on my travels. It’s disgusting and calling it a sweet should be against all trade descriptions. My apologies to the one Danish reader I know who reads this and my English insensitivity and inflexible narrow tastes.

The Museum of Broken Relationships

In 2016, West was in Zagreb, Croatia at another unusual museum; one for broken relationships which included a diet book a less than happy woman received from her betrothed. West, who has lived in Sweden for 20 years, extended the idea of failure to business products and services, opening in…