How a Museum Put History on the School Menu

What if the most effective way to get students engaging with history wasn’t a lesson, a worksheet, or even a museum visit — but lunch? At the Museums & Schools Summit 2026, Claire Géraud-Stewart and Quentin Arné from the Musées départementaux du Val d’Oise presented a project that has been doing exactly that for the past seven years.

The archeo meals programme is, on the surface, a simple idea. Twice a year, every public high school in the Val d’Oise département — a largely urban area of 1.2 million people just northwest of Paris — serves its students a historically inspired lunch. In spring, the menu draws on medieval food traditions. In autumn, it’s Roman. Students eat dishes like stir-fried pork with dried fruit, or stuffed dates filled with almonds, pine nuts, apricots, and honey — all prepared by the authority’s own school chefs and cleared for historical authenticity by museum staff.

The reality, though, is more ambitious than it first appears.

A Clever Way In

Claire Géraud-Stewart, director of the Archaeological Museum of Val d’Oise, is refreshingly candid about the challenge that gave rise to the project. In France, she explained, it is genuinely difficult for cultural organisations to work directly with schools. Teachers and school directors don’t have publicly accessible email addresses. Contact must go through layers of intermediaries. Museums are expected to engage with young people, but the institutional architecture makes it hard to reach them.

“What we needed was a bit of a cheeky idea,” she said. “We needed a clever way to get in touch with a large number of students while bypassing this organisation.”

The solution came from an unexpected angle. While the museum had no direct route into classrooms, the local authority responsible for the museum also happened to run the school lunch hour. That structural overlap became the project’s foundation. Rather than waiting for teachers to bring students to the museum, the museum came to the students — at the canteen, at lunchtime, on the authority’s own terms.

The first iteration of the project ran in 2019, when Géraud-Stewart was director of an archaeological site in the Ardèche. It was smaller in scale then, visiting schools one at a time. The move to Val d’Oise, with its 40-plus high schools, gave the project the reach to become something much larger.

Getting the Menu Right

Developing each meal is a genuine collaborative process. The museum team draws on a collection of historic recipe books and archaeological documentation to identify ingredients and dishes appropriate to the period. These are shared with the authority’s school chefs and nutritionist, who develop menu ideas in return. The lists go back and forth until both sides are satisfied — the chefs reassured about practicality and cost, the museum team confident about historical accuracy.

Accuracy, it turns out, is as much about exclusion as inclusion. Tomatoes, carrots, and chocolate are obvious modern imports. Garum — the Roman fermented fish sauce — is historically correct but tends to make chefs nervous. “The chefs might be a little more timorous than what we would prefer,” Géraud-Stewart noted with some amusement.

Every meal includes at least two main course options to accommodate dietary requirements, along with variations on the starter, dairy course, and dessert. The format follows the standard structure of a French school lunch — starter, main, dairy, dessert, baguette — simply transposed into another era.

Crucially, food waste at the end of these meals is no higher than for an ordinary lunch. The cost difference is minimal. Honey and dried fruit are slightly more expensive than standard ingredients, but the overall additional spend is negligible. “These goals have been achieved at a negligible cost,” said Géraud-Stewart. “The most expensive thing we’ve done is probably today, making this film.”

Bringing History to the Table — Literally

On the day of each meal, the museum dispatches six two-person teams to different school cafeterias across the département. Each team brings books, documentation, objects to handle, costumes to wear, and spices to smell. On each table, there is a short activity — recreating a Roman mosaic, arranging a basket, making a treat to eat — designed to take between two and five minutes and to work for individuals or small groups.

Museum educator Quentin Arné described the atmosphere these visits create. “We know that these activities are very popular because the children are happy to see us back again every year.” The interactions are low-pressure by design: there is no obligation to participate, and the format is flexible enough to split larger groups. Each team reaches around 100 to 150 students in a session.

The questions students ask, Arné noted, range across the expected and the personal. They want to know about Roman food, yes — but also about the museum’s collection, about what archaeologists actually do, and about how he and his colleagues ended up working in a museum at all.

To demonstrate one of the meal’s recipes, Arné prepared stuffed dates on camera: pitted dates filled with a mixture of almonds, pine nuts, dried apricots, honey, and — for historical completeness — a dash of fish sauce. The result, dispatched to Géraud-Stewart mid-presentation, was met with evident approval.

Two Goals, Honestly Assessed

Géraud-Stewart was notably clear-eyed about what the project has and hasn’t achieved. She framed it around two distinct goals, and assessed each separately.

The first goal was visibility — demonstrating the museum’s reach to the elected officials and senior civil servants whose support determines what projects get funded. On this measure, the programme has performed well. Elected officials regularly attend the meals in a dedicated room at one of the schools. The project generates local press coverage and internal communications across the authority. “I have no doubt that this is one of the reasons why some of our more ambitious projects have managed to find funding,” she said.

The second goal — genuine educational engagement with students — has been achieved to a degree, but with room to improve. Paper placemats with games and historical information were trialled early on and abandoned: they didn’t get read, got dirty quickly, and ended up in the bin. Many teachers aren’t aware the meals are happening until they arrive at the canteen, meaning the opportunity to prepare students beforehand is rarely taken. Museum teams can only visit a fraction of schools on the day. And while a number of students do engage meaningfully with the activities and the museum staff, they remain a minority of those eating the meal.

The museum has responded to this with virtual exhibitions on medieval food and Roman life, offering teachers and students quizzes, information, and activities to use before or after the meals. But Géraud-Stewart was frank that this isn’t yet enough. The next step, she suggested, is creating genuinely usable classroom materials — problems in Roman numerals for maths teachers, discussions about the geographical origins of food for history teachers — that could help embed the meals into curriculum time rather than treating them as a standalone event.

What the Project Is Really For

Stepping back from the metrics, Géraud-Stewart offered a more fundamental account of what success looks like. “The main success for the children of these archaeological meals is not necessarily in what they learn, but it’s the degree to which we’re able to create curiosity — a sense of confidence in our shared culture, a culture that is based not exclusively on Europe but especially around the Mediterranean and its many meals, cuisines, and ingredients.”

That is, perhaps, a more honest measure of what a two-minute activity at a school canteen table can realistically achieve. Not mastery of Roman history. Not a transformed relationship with a museum. But a flicker of recognition that the food on their plate has a story — and that the story is longer and stranger and more connected to them than they might have assumed.

Looking ahead, the team is considering extending the programme to new historical periods: Neolithic food, Renaissance cuisine, or even the early twentieth century. They’re also exploring how to work more closely with primary schools, which have begun approaching them independently, and how to better involve the cafeteria staff whose work underpins the whole operation. In the project’s earliest days, canteen workers were invited to the museum at the end of the school year for a dedicated event of their own. It’s an ambition the team wants to revive.

The archeo meals programme is, in the end, a model built on institutional pragmatism as much as pedagogical idealism. It works because it found a structural lever — control of the school lunch hour — and used it to do something none of the usual routes could. That it also turns out to be genuinely enjoyable, historically rigorous, and almost free to run is what makes it worth paying attention to.

Claire Géraud-Stewart is Director of the Musées départementaux du Val d’Oise. Quentin Arné is a Museum Educator at the same institution. They presented at the Museums & Schools Summit 2026.