As I work on this series of posts about cooking with toddlers, I've been thinking about cooking photography and the history of science and natural history. Do people select the most symmetric slice of cake to photograph? The most pleasantly irregular cobbler? What is most helpful - a field guide with a photo of a typical female cardinal sitting on a branch or meticulously painted images of that same female cardinal? 

I've been reading Objectivity by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison and it's got me thinking about how we choose to represent an activity - in this case - whether I choose to show the average toddler cooking experience, the ideal, the exceptional, the outrageously messy, the beautiful, etc....