What is the culinary experience like when the food is served on a petri dish?
When SDU was visited by CESE’s management on 1 November 2021, dining, dissemination of knowledge and design came together.
For lunch, the food from SDU’s canteen was served on petri dishes, and water and juice were served in test tubes and flasks. While the food from the canteen was familiar, the presentation was new, which brought a communication value to the table: Packaging matters, and this also applies in science and communication.
The canteen food on the petri dish is thus an analogy, because just as the culinary content depends on the presentation, academic and scientific content is also dependent on forms of communication and scientific formats. The format has implications for what and how to consume and recognise content.
The laboratory equipment entails understandings that are expressed differently by the academic traditions of natural science that were represented at the luncheon. After all, in actual practice in biological and chemical laboratories, it is unheard of to eat from a petri dish, while a mathematician wouldn’t give it a second thought.
From CESE, Gitte Miller Balslev and Martin Krabbe Sillasen came to discuss the basic values of CESE’s research. CESE, the Center of Excellence in Science Education, is the research trail at the NAFA Science Academy. Gitte shared her experience of the lunch on her LinkedIn page, where she writes: ‘This is what the relationship between culinary content and presentation can look like when a centre for research and dissemination of maths and science is introduced at a lunch meeting at the University of Southern Denmark. Thanks to Connie Svabo for her vivid presentation!’
A big thanks to Mon Oo Yee, postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Biology, for her kind help and loan of equipment.