Eating in the Stone Age

So there are all of these museums here, and most of them have a cafe or restaurant inside. The art museum has coffee and pastries, the museum of Natural History has pizza and pasta, but it gets really weird when you go to the two museums which represent the opposite ends of the "development" spectrum.

If you visit the American Indian museum (now the preferred legal term for describing "Native Americans") you'll find very fancy fare. It's all traditional dishes made with ingredients from North America: plank-grilled wild salmon, bison steaks, wild mushroom salad with green onions, wild rice salad with watercress and dried cranberries, baked quail stuffed with strawberries. Honestly, the prices are quite reasonable too! I have enjoyed visits to the museum, but since they don't charge to get into museums in DC I have also walked in, gone straight for the food, and walked out very satisfied with my visit.

It wasn't until recently that I finally visited the Air and Space museum. It's a hugely popular museum, packed with visitors learning about the most advanced science and travel technologies. The thing that was absolutely shocking to me was that if you want to eat while you visit the space age, you have two choices: McDonald's and Boston Market. Each offers a very limited selection of their usual menus at shockingly inflated prices.

Isn't that a sad commentary on how "far" we've come?