Critical Approaches to Food in Children's

Literature
Bhadury, Poushali . The Lion and the Unicorn ; Baltimore  Vol. 35, Iss. 2,  (Apr 2011): 189-194.

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ABSTRACT
 
[...] food in Nancy Drew stories marks class status and moral superiority, signaling "the protagonists' privileged
status and ability to consume at will" (77), while separating Nancy and her friends from the criminal elements they
encounter; second, cooking and eating "provide repetitive ritual, domestic comfort" (77) by letting the characters
(and readers) recharge after high-action sleuthing sequences, and allow for specifically feminine interaction
between the protagonists; and third, food charts the three main characters' consumption and body image. The
essays consider diverse genres of children's texts-"picture books, chapter books, popular media, and children's
cookbooks" (14) for instance-as well as utilizing "archival research, culture studies, feminism, formalism, gender
studies, material culture, metaphysics, popular culture, postcolonialism, post-structuralism, race, structuralism and
theology" (14).

FULL TEXT
 
Kara K. Keeling and Scott T. Pollard, eds. Critical Approaches to Food in Children's Literature. New York: Routledge,
2009.
Kara Keeling and Scott Pollard's introduction to this essay collection-a pioneering critical anthology exploring the
intersection of food studies and children's literature-resembles a manifesto. The editors argue for the central ity of
representations of food in human experience and cultures in general, and literary discourse in particular. They
begin by analyzing a passage from The Odyssey to explain how the "presence of food, food production, and scenes
of eating and feasting" (4) become integral to the epic, before moving on to other pivotal food-related moments in
Gilgamesh, The Metamorphoses, The Canterbury Tales, and The Remembrance of Things Past. Their examples
underscore this volume's premise that food studies, and literary studies of food in particular, have long been
marginalized within academic discourse.
Food studies, Keeling and Pollard write, began primarily in anthropology, sociology, and history, and then moved
into the humanities, most significantly with the 2001 founding of Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture,
an interdisciplinary journal of food studies that also addresses literature. Mentioning prominent theorists-Roland
Barthes, Mikhail Bakhtin, Louis Marin, Julia Kristeva-who place "food at the center of their cultural analyses" (8),
the editors declare that the "field is now at the point that we need studies exclusively devoted to food and
literature" (8). They narrow this focus by interrogating the complex ways in which food manifests within children's
literature, and admit that the intersection of children's literature and food studies scholarship yields many more
articles than book-length analyses. Their volume of essays, arising from their Children's Literature Association
special session on food at the 2004 Modern Language Association conference, thus comes as a welcome addition
to existing scholarship.
Critical Approaches to Food in Children's Literature offers sixteen essays drawing from a range of children's texts
as well as diverse theoretical approaches; the editors liken the book's five thematic sections to a multi-course
banquet (especially since they get increasingly longer). The introduction starts the feast, followed by "Reading as
Cooking," which includes Jodie Slothower and Jan Susina's "Delicious Supplements: Literary Cookbooks as

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Additives to Children's Texts." Following Susan Leonardi's definition of cookbooks as "embedded narratives,"
Slothower and Susina examine the manifold dynamics at play between "original text and the cookbook, author and
reader, recipe and creator, and various readership communities" (22). Literary cookbooks such as Roald Dahl's
Revolting Recipes (1994) or Beatrix Potter's Country Cooking (1991), part of the commercial afterlives of key
children's texts, become important performative spaces. For instance, "child readers and adults assisting child
cooks" (32) establish structures of power and play, interacting with narratives and cookbooks in creative and
empowering ways.
Following this appetizer to Critical Approaches, the third course-"Girls, Mothers, Children"- explores the gender
dynamics at play in food and cooking across generations. In "The Apple of Her Eye: The Mothering Ideology Fed by
Best-selling Trade Picture Books," Lisa Rowe Fraustino uses the notion of a normative, socially-constructed
mothering ideology-theorized by feminist texts such as Nancy Chodorow's The Reproduction of Mothering (1978)-
in her analysis of mother-child relationships in best-selling trade picture books like Shel Silverstein's The Giving
Tree and Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. Fraustino forcefully dissects the way these picture books
(re)present the notion of the idealized, "good" mother via essentialized relationships signified by cooking, food,
giving, and love. In Sendak's text, for instance, boy adventurer Max "smell[s] good things to eat" and comes home
to a "still hot" supper, evidence that his mother "loves him best, as a culturally defined good mother should" (64).
The food here becomes a direct metaphor for Max's mother's love.
The three essayists of Keeling and Pollard's fourth course, "Food and the Body," examine literary protagonists'
corporeality. In "Nancy Drew and the 'F' Word," Leona W. Fisher argues for a triple significance to the extensive
depiction of food in the series. First, food in Nancy Drew stories marks class status and moral superiority,
signaling "the protagonists' privileged status and ability to consume at will" (77), while separating Nancy and her
friends from the criminal elements they encounter; second, cooking and eating "provide repetitive ritual, domestic
comfort" (77) by letting the characters (and readers) recharge after high-action sleuthing sequences, and allow for
specifically feminine interaction between the protagonists; and third, food charts the three main characters'
consumption and body image. While Nancy represents a happy medium and George a "boyish" athlete, Bess has
trouble balancing her love of food and her perpetual desire to lose weight. Jean Webb's "'Voracious Appetites': The
Construction of 'Fatness' in the Boy Hero in English Children's Literature" also concerns obesity. Webb starts out
by examining nineteenth century English texts-especially classics such as Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857) and
The Water Babies (1863)-that celebrate muscular Christianity, to trace how being overweight becomes associated
with negative moral qualities like gluttony and undue self-indulgence. The sedentary, fat child is a paradigmatic
figure against which the trope of the "manful" (107) hero-as a strong, athletic, disciplined, and virtuous English boy,
free from the sins of greed and a lack of self-control-is defined. After discussing key twentieth century texts like
Lord of the Flies (1954), Webb charts a "shift" (120) in recent novels like Holes (1998) or Fat Boy Swim (2003),
where the overweight adolescent comes to terms with, and develops a more positive relationship to, his body. In
Jacqueline M. Labbe's excellent "To Eat and Be Eaten in Nineteenth-Century Children's Literature," however, bodies
take on a different moral significance. Labbe points out that "[w]hen food transmutes from nourishment for the
child's body to a metonym for the child's body, eating is less about satisfying corporeal needs than about
symbolizing moral needs" (101). The author draws her analysis in terms of binary distinctions-in an age where food
adulteration (for instance, alum in bread, highly poisonous strychnine in beer, or lead chromate in mustard) was a
social menace, the good/bad, pure/corrupt binaries act at distinct levels of social signification. To consume the
good child is to purify oneself in an inherently Eucharistic act-as in "Goblin Market," where the "pure" sister Lizzie
offers to heal the "fallen" sister Laura's moral contamination by asking the latter to "Eat me, drink me, love me"
(95)-but naughty children, eaten as a form of punishment, provide the best "culinary delights" (100), as for instance
in the "Nonsensical Story about Giants and Fairies" in Holiday House (1839), where the fat, lazy and gluttonous
Master No-book nearly gets eaten by a giant. Labbe locates a rhetoric of threats, violence, and the everpresent idea
of death and punishment for not-so-subtle moral and didactic purposes in the texts she analyzes, and points out
the contradiction inherent in the trope of the eaten child itself. Both the pure and the adulterated child are "good"

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for the eater: the former "cleanses and overcomes sin" whereas the ingestion of the latter is "required to combat
and punish sin" (101)-thus driving the focus from the one eaten to the one who eats.
"Global/Multicultural/Postcolonial Food," Keeling and Pollard's next section, is an entrée of truly ambitious,
international proportions. The first three essays address the expression of national and cultural identity through
ideologically loaded notions of cooking, food, and etiquette. While Winnie Chan addresses imperialist (boy) eaters
in Kipling's tales in her essay "'The Eaters of Everything': Etiquettes of Empire in Kipling's Narratives of Imperial
Boys," highlighting the nationalist agenda behind etiquette defining the "proper" Englishman, Lan Dong's "Eating
Different, Looking Different: Food in Asian American Childhood" provides an analysis of the ways Asian American
ethnic identity is constructed and circumscribed by traditional cuisines. Karen Hill McNamara examines children's
and young adult literature dealing with the Irish famine in terms of the narratives' socializing aspects, looking into
the lack of food as "the single most powerful signifier of Irish identity" (149) in the wake of a tragedy as
devastating as the Great Irish Famine of the mid-1800s. McNamara's focus on "historically accurate
representations of food collection" (152) during the famine in these texts illustrates how children's literature can
negotiate national trauma-along with its attendant dark legacies like collective survivor's guilt and shame-at the
complex juncture of history and fiction. The remaining two essays-by Genny Ballard and Richard Vernon,
respectively-theorize Latino gender, culture, and politics in terms of food, which plays a crucial role in familial
relationships, community building, and spatially directed relationships with the world (especially in case of
immigration). Engaging, diverse in their theoretical and critical approaches, these essays productively widen the
perspective of the collection.
The concluding section, "Through Food the/a Self," investigates how constructions and deconstructions of
childhood identity are inextricably linked to the symbolic dimensions of food. In his well-crafted "Oranges of
Paradise: The Orange as Symbol of Escape and Loss in Children's Literature," James Everett investigates the
receptions of an exotic-turned-prosaic symbol in nineteenth-century literature for and about children. Originally, the
orange was exported from the east and coded with elements of desire and a sense of rarity; it is often seen "as
magic, as a harbinger or token of another world" (197), especially in Christmas stories. Later, the orange "lose[s]
literary value" (194) but gains metaphorical heft; Everett brings up, for instance, "the orange's aporetic connection
of promising escape while simultaneously calling attention to one's entrapment . . . [and] signifying deep values
not immediately attainable" (195). Everett's essay exemplifies the way in which food images in children's literature
perform a wealth of associative functions and play a large part in collective cultural constructions of childhood in
various parts of the Western world. Another sterling example from this section is Annette Wannamaker's "'The
Attack of the Inedible Hunk!': Food, Language and Power in the Captain Underpants Series," which takes up the
"monstrous and [the] excessive" (245) in conjunction with food and linguistic play in Dav Pilkey's novels.
Wannamaker highlights similarities in the ways language and food are used and abused within the series to
subvert adult power, authority, and expectations, as well as to derive a distinctive brand of "carnivalesque humor"
(243). She points out, nonetheless, that even these attempts at subversion are situated within adult (and
corporate) sanctioned systems, spaces, and institutions.
This collection is ambitiously diverse in the ways it explores the pervasive trope of food within children's literature.
However, apart from Elizabeth Gargano's "Trials of Taste: Ideological 'Food Fights' in Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle
in Time," which analyzes L'Engle's pointed critique of mid-twentieth century consumerist practices as embodied in
processed, "synthetic" (208) food, the articles largely shy away from considering children's texts that highlight the
often vicious cycles of food production, distribution, and marketing in capitalist societies. Future scholarly
endeavors also might investigate children's literature in terms of the ecological ramifications of past and present
food cultures, and of other debates within food studies: sustainability, GMOs, and-as Michael Pollan argues-the
problematic shift from the term "food" to "nutrients" (19) in U.S. consumer culture.
One of this collection's most significant contributions is in its commitment to an international perspective. Critical
perspectives on multicultural and global children's literature co-exist with essays on Anglo-American texts
(although there are decidedly more of the latter), making this collection suitable for courses in multicultural

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children's literature and introductory cultural studies. Equally laudable is the dedication to interdisciplinarity,
lending credence to food studies as an area reaching beyond niche status. The essays consider diverse genres of
children's texts-"picture books, chapter books, popular media, and children's cookbooks" (14) for instance-as well
as utilizing "archival research, culture studies, feminism, formalism, gender studies, material culture, metaphysics,
popular culture, postcolonialism, post-structuralism, race, structuralism and theology" (14). The menu is indeed so
rich as to be almost decentered, despite the thematic organization. However, this lack of a single focus
underscores the collection's ambition and range. Instigating a critical conversation in a nascent field, and taking
into consideration its pioneering status in food studies, Critical Approaches to Food in Children's Literature is a
scholarly smorgasbord.
References
Works Cited
Pollan, Michael. In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. New York: Penguin Press, 2008. Print.
AuthorAffiliation
Poushali Bhadury is pursuing her doctorate in English at the University of Florida, where she teaches
undergraduate courses in composition, as well as British and world literatures. She recently published
"Pedagogical Preoccupations in Montgomery" (Jadavpur University Essays and Studies XXIV, 2010) and "Fictional
Spaces, Contested Images: Anne's 'Authentic' Afterlife" (Children's Literature Association Quarterly 36.2).

DETAILS

Subject: Childrens literature; Novels; Anthologies; Childrens picture books; Children &youth;
Linguistics; Food; Essays

Publication title: The Lion and the Unicorn; Baltimore

Volume: 35

Issue: 2

Pages: 189-194

Number of pages: 6

Publication year: 2011

Publication date: Apr 2011

Section: Book Reviews

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

Place of publication: Baltimore

Country of publication: United States, Baltimore

Publication subject: Literary And Political Reviews

ISSN: 01472593

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 Source type: Scholarly Journals

Language of publication: English

Document type: Book Review-Favorable

Document feature: References

ProQuest document ID: 902912732

Document URL: https://search.proquest.com/docview/902912732?accountid=145163

Copyright: Copyright Johns Hopkins University Press Apr 2011

Last updated: 2015-11-14

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