In what can only be seen as a desperate attempt to increase attendance, the Ontario Science Centre recently unveiled its newest exhibit: Candy Unwrapped. Sponsored by the Jelly Belly company, the exhibit features far more than any sane person could ever want to know about candy, with exhibits ranging from the physiology of sucking on sour candies to taste buds and the importance of smell.
The exhibit is interesting, but light on science. You can suck on super-sour candies from Thailand while reading that the sour flavour is produced by malic acid, an acid typically found in fruit. These candies are so high in acid that they will actually cause sores on the inside of your mouth if you eat more than a couple.
There is also a large exhibit of disgusting food from around the world, where patrons enter codes corresponding to foods they like to eat and get out the “tastes-just-like” equivalent, in more revolting terms. For instance, fried chicken and French fries apparently tastes just like fried tarantula with moth larvae. They really play up the gross-foods angle, too, reminding visitors that gelatine comes from pig hooves and bones, and that ammonium chloride, the main flavouring in black liquorice, used to be derived from camel dung.
Besides these in-your-face exhibits, there are also some tamer things, like a report from a biologist in New Zealand who uses honey to treat wounds, and a short list of uses for sugar besides eating (the most interesting of these is a Coca-Cola bottle made from sugar—used in movies because it breaks without causing injury.)
The whole exhibit seems to be geared to eight-year-olds with short attention spans. My brother and sister, who are eleven, both loved it. There are lots of bright colours, interactive displays and quick trivia facts, without much attention to the science underneath. The bits of explanatory text aren’t very useful—I found the one about smell difficult to follow—and it seems like they really don’t expect people to read them. Some exhibits are just irritating—like a giant interactive tongue with taste buds that loudly proclaim “salty” or “sweet” when kids jump on them. The aural experience of fifty kids, hopped-up on candy and jumping up and down on that tongue, is something that has to be experienced to be properly appreciated.
Kevin Von Appen, the associate director of digital media and publications at the Science Centre, is in charge of a lot of the presentation components of the exhibit. He commented on the difficulty of making a presentation that will interest people and teach them at the same time. Von Appen admitted that this balance is an ongoing challenge, but stressed that the Science Centre’s main goal is to make people interested in science. “We are fundamentally not in the business of giving people everything they could want on a subject,” he said. Instead, the Science Centre wants to give people the beginning of an interest, in the hopes that they will follow up and learn more on their own.
