The Visual Cultures of Showing ‘Nourishment’ in a Glass Case: or why Wonder!

This article discusses how a detail can bring information about habits and ways, about how institutions work and how we exchange information about this. These issues take their point of departure in my overall question: What is the purpose of cutting off the essential characteristics of a meal by placing it where you cannot touch it, eat it, smell it, taste it – in other words of turning it into an exhibition item? By removing the characteristics from food, it would in all probability be even more difficult to attain the purpose of exhibiting it: to sell it to students and staff.
My discussion of the phenomenon of nourishment in glass cases draws on approaches developed and discussed as visual culture methodology. With a visual culture approach, visuals work as constructions of visual knowledge and as indicators of the relation between an observer's glance and the phenomenon observed. The implication is that my positioning as an observer becomes part of the discussion.