Critical Approaches to Food in Children's Literature (review)

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 centrality 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 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...