Exhibit hits you right in the sweet spot

But these days, it’s as if nothing has to degrade anymore. Preservatives, not to mention fixatives sprayed or brushed on top, make food alarmingly sturdy and long-lasting. “You Art What You Eat,’’ a bonbon of a show - tasty, but with little nutritional value - in Mass MoCA’s Kidspace, exults in the perky tonal and sculptural possibilities of kid-friendly foods such as Jell-O, gummy candy, and Fruit Loops.

The show has none of the heft or meaning of, say, sculptor Jana Sterbak’s dress made of flank steak, which decomposed over the course of an exhibition. Nor should it, in a space packed with children’s activities.

Sure, Liz Hickok’s “The White House,’’ seen here in three versions - sculpture, photography, and video - relies on the decomposition of her Jell-O-molded White House to make a point about the direction in which she sees the country moving. But it’s a hopeful point: The photo series subtitled “The First 100 Days’’ and the video reverse the process, starting with a shrunken, moldy White House that over time (presumably, the first days of the Obama administration) grows bigger, clearer, and more luminous.

It’s almost a disappointment to come across Hickok’s sculpture, a diminutive item compared to how it appears on screen and in photos. The good part about seeing it live is that you get to touch it, and it jiggles.

Chandra Bocci works on a much larger scale. Her delightful “Big Bang’’ explodes over a wall. The center is a cluster of orange, yellow, and white Gummi bears, worms, and fish, illuminated from within. Bocci has used rods and wires to string up the scattered debris - more gummies, which get progressively cooler toned toward the ragged outskirts of the piece.

Across the gallery, Bocci’s “Coral Reef’’ is a carbohydrate marvel, a coral reef constructed of Fruit Loops, marshmallows, twisty cheese stick snacks, pink mints, and empty ice cream cones. In a more architectural vein, Joan Steiner has constructed the “Leaning Tower of Pisa’’ out of cookies. Pieces such as these have a whimsical appeal. There’s a delicious meeting point between what you’re not supposed to touch - the art - and the handy accessibility of this type of food that make touching, and even snacking, hard to resist.

Not everything here is edible, or even was once edible. Steiner is the author of a series of “Look-Alikes’’ books, for which she builds remarkable miniature dioramas out of all sorts of unexpected things - not just food - and photographs them. An enchanting photo of her small-scale construction of the Taj Mahal features onions for domes, Brussels-sprout shrubs, and walls made of white chocolate.

In “Candy Wrapper Curtain,’’ Luisa Caldwell takes hard-candy wrappers, folds them into crinkly butterflies, and strings them in columns from the ceiling. She also collects produce stickers and makes collages, (some of these are notably similar to work by Boston artist Rachel Perry Welty). Caldwell considers how we sort, market, and classify food. Her mixed-media painting “Still Life With Skull’’ features flowers made out of fruit stickers.

Another children’s book author, Saxton Freymann, carves fruits and vegetables into comical, sometimes heart-rending characters. We’ve got just the photos to go by - no doubt the subjects have long since hit the compost pile - but they’re vivid, and full of personality. “Orange Parent’’ from his book “Food Play’’ shows the orange with wide eyes, its mouth gashed out, and its bared teeth built from pith, furious or horrified at all the little oranges around it.

Any underlying messages here are light and easy in a show meant for kids. Visitors are invited to make their own edible artwork, listen to food songs, read about food, and contribute to a candy mural. But it’s fun, and funny, and even occasionally gripping. And it’s a good deal more upbeat than many of the exhibitions in the rest of Mass MoCA’s galleries right now, including the bleak “These Days: Elegies for Modern Times’’ and “This Is Killing Me.’’