Galen Clarke/Tribune

Tom Hughes pulls a model lobster boat out of a box marked "Seafood" to add to an exhibit at foodmuseum.com, the online museum of all things edible that he and his wife, Meredith, have created. Hughes, a former teacher, says food is one of the most important and revealing aspects of any culture.

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Different types of salt have distinct perfumes. The oldest domesticated food is the date palm found in Iraq. The licorice plant is a member of the pea family.

If any of this counts as news to you, there's a virtual museum with a real-life footprint in Albuquerque that's probably worth a visit.

The Food Museum is the work of Tom and Meredith Hughes, a food researcher and food writer, respectively. Their work takes them all over the world, they said.

The Hugheses live on the West Side in a home filled with food memorabilia, food books and food art. There's also plenty of homemade iced tea.

Their museum, on the other hand, exists at foodmuseum.com, but the Hugheses are looking for a permanent physical location, they said.

They acknowledge that food is a somewhat obscure topic for a museum, but say that ought to change.

"It is overlooked in museums, even until recently in the academic field," Tom Hughes said.

The Food Museum grew out of Tom Hughes' first endeavor, the Potato Museum, he said.

In 1975, the fifth grade class he taught at the International School of Brussels studied the potato because of the magnitude of the world crop, he said. In 1976, Hughes started to collect potato memorabilia, according to the Potato Museum Web site.

In 1985, the artifacts were displayed in a small gallery space in Washington, D.C., according to the Web site.

The Hugheses moved to Albuquerque in 1993 because they liked the area and the vibrant culture, they said.

In the same year, the Potato Museum spun off into the Food Museum. In 1996, the Food Museum was launched on the Web, according to the Web site.

The potato artifacts are in storage now, and they number in the thousands, Tom Hughes estimates.

Artifacts, by the way, do not mean old potatoes — although they fit a broad definition of potato-related items and include potato harvesting tools and chocolates shaped like French fries.

The Potato Museum's artifacts have been used in many exhibits, including the Smithsonian's "Seeds of Change: the Quincentenary of the Columbus Voyage to America," according to the Web site.

Clearly, the Hugheses have a passion for food. Meredith has written 12 books on food and does gardening for hire, she said. Tom does most of the research for Meredith's books, he said.

They recently traveled to France's food heritage sites, and Meredith just published "Gastronomie! Food Museums & Heritage Sites of France," she said.

The Hugheses have looked into a brick-and-mortar museum, and some potential partners have popped up abroad, Tom Hughes said. Another option is to continue to loan artifacts to other museums, he said. He would also like open a New Mexican Food Museum.

But for now, he said, they like the Internet because it is very 21st century, allows access around the globe and around the clock, and provides easy interaction with the public. The museum also does not have to commit to endless hours of fund-raising.

The museum gets just under 200,000 hits a year, Meredith Hughes said.

She also said her food blog is the first blog of any museum and has been recently nominated as Best Food Blog by the Blogger's Choice Awards.

The museum designates cities, ranches and farms as food heritage sites based on how well they preserve food history. New Mexico is one of these sites, based on its 20,000 years of hunting, gathering, raising, growing, cooking, marketing and eating, according to the Food Museum Web site.

Some exhibits on the museum site rotate. For example, a summer watermelon exhibit showcases Japanese square watermelons, documents the rising popularity of yellow watermelons and has a photo gallery of melons carved into intricate designs.

The Hugheses also focus on educating youth about the importance of healthy eating. Meredith Hughes has written a textbook series called "Plants We Eat" for middle school students, and together they teach a class called "Chocolate, Chiles, Corn and More" in some of New Mexico's schools.