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Reviewed by:
  • Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature
  • Judy Rosenbaum (bio)
Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature. Edited by Kara K. Keeling and Scott T. Pollard. New York: Routledge, 2009.

C. S. Lewis’s book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe takes Lucy Pevensie through the wardrobe door to the otherworld of Narnia. In this land of marvels, the first thing Lucy does is sit down with Tumnus the faun to tea, which Lewis describes in considerable detail: “a nice brown egg, lightly boiled, for each of them, and then sardines on toast, ” and so on through to “a sugar-topped cake.” It is not, it would seem, a feast befitting a wondrous kingdom. Yet meals of this simple, hearty variety abound in Narnia. One reason might be that as Lewis wrote the Narnian Chronicles, England was still living under stringent wartime/postwar food rationing. Every English child would have savored reading about these meals. The Chronicles thus provide an escape not just into Narnia but into England as it should be.

Because it is one of our most basic daily needs, food has meaning far beyond just something to satisfy our hunger. Studying food in children’s literature can give insight into issues of character, culture, historical context, societal values, body image, and gender. Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature, which declares itself the first scholarly collection dealing with this topic in literature for young readers, gathers together essays that examine a wide variety of books.

The comprehensive introduction covers the history of the rather young field of food study in literary criticism. In the essays themselves, writers explore not only Anglo-American issues of both historical and modern eras but also matters involving other cultures. Some of the essays tend toward the speculative, notably “A Consuming Tradition: Candy and Socio-Religious Identity Formation in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” by Robert M. Kachur. Others, such as “Trials of Taste: Ideological ‘Food Fights’ in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time” by Elizabeth Gargano, analyze food in a manner that confirms themes expressed by an author in other ways in the work. In Gargano’s essay L’Engle’s well-known impatience with conformity and rigidity, and the high value she places on family and friendship, are shown to be reflected in several very different meals that occur throughout the story.

One essay that would tempt people to go out on a book-finding expedition is “Delicious Supplements: Literary Cookbooks as Additives to Children’s Texts,” by Jodie Slothower and Jan Susina. This article surveys the huge variety of cookbooks based on children’s books. Some interesting cookbooks, which the essayists call “text extenders,” provide recipes that “would be appropriate within the cultural context of the original narratives.” The authors remark on the way literature-based cookbooks can help create “a community of child readers and adults assisting child cooks.”

Essays dealing with gender or body issues include Lisa Rowe Fraustino’s “The Apple of Her Eye: The Mothering Ideology Fed by Best-Selling [End Page 297] Trade Picture Books”; Martha Satz’s “Prevailing Culinary, Psychological, and Metaphysical Conditions: Meatballs and Reality” (with discusses the humorous classic Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs by Judi Barrett); and “Nancy Drew and the ‘F’ Word” by Leona W. Fisher (the “F” word being food). Leona Fisher’s study deals additionally with the way food reflects changes in American culture across Nancy Drew’s long publishing history.

Essays dealing with diverse cultures in the United States include “Eating Different, Looking Different: Food in Asian American Childhood” by Lan Dong. The authors featured in this study, Jade Snow Wong and Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, write about challenges that their families encountered while trying to adapt to life in the United States—sometimes, as in the case of Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, who was interned during World War II, in the face of unfathomable adversity. For these authors and their families, food provided a cultural identity and the comfort of a familiar context.

In “The Keys to the Kitchen: Cooking and Latina Power in Latin(o) American Children’s Stories,” Genny Ballard examines two books...

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