Food in Children’s Books
In Alice and Wonderland, there are quite a few instances in which Alice uses food to transform herself into a different size being than she it supposed to be. In the beginning of the story, Alice comes upon a little bottle that says, “Drink me,” which she does. The potion inside the bottle, which tastes like, “a sort of mixed flavor of cherry-tart, custard, pineapple, roast turkey, toffy, and hot buttered toast (pp. 17-18),” shrinks Alice into an itty-bitty person. She is terribly upset about this until she discovers a tiny cake “on which the words ‘EAT ME’ were beautifully marked in currants (pp. 19).” She does take a bite, which causes her to grow very big indeed! A bit later on, Alice finds herself faced with a caterpillar who tells her of a certain size-changing mushroom: “one side will make you grow taller, the other side will make you grow smaller (pp. 55).” Alice takes the mushroom with her and finds it very handy when battling the royal court later in the story. I suppose the notion of food causing metamorphosis is not really farfetched; in essence, food does make you grow bigger, and lack of food makes you grow smaller. It’s not instantaneous as it is here in Alice, but I know that the food I consumed my freshman year caused me to grow bigger, and the lack of food I consumed my sophomore year to make up for it caused me to grow smaller. So, I believe that Carroll probably got the idea from a failed diet attempt or other such real-life experience.
Bribery is another way in which food is often used in children’s books. In Goblin Market, the entire storyline is based on how goblins try to bribe little girls with food. The tempt little Laura and her sister Lizzie with “come buy, come buy…crab-apples, dewberries, pine-apples, blackberries (pp.1-3).” The goblins repeatedly try to tempt the little girls from their paths with promises of lush fruits as their reward. The girls resist for awhile, saying, “Their offers should not charm us, their evil gifts would harm us (pp. 2),” but Laura’s resolve does not last for long. She accepts the bribe of fruit, and later tells Lizzie, “you cannot think what figs my teeth have met in, what melons icy-cold, piled on a dish of gold, too huge for me to hold (pp. 5).” The appeal if icy-melons was just too much for Laura to resist. Later, Lizzie says to Laura, “I hear the fruit-call, but I dare not look (pp. 7).” Clearly, the fruit is the bribe here, and apparently a very strong one. Fruit seems to have the irresistible pull to these children that sex has to adults, if this poem’s publication in Playboy is any indication. Another novel in which food is used for bribery is Danny the Champion of the World. Danny’s father, and his father before him, use raisins to bribe the pheasants they poach into compliance, because, “pheasants…are crazy about raisins (pp.34).” Danny’s father explains the several methods of bribery, including the “horsehair stopper” and the “sticky hat,” but no method is quite as successful as Danny’s champion idea: “now…we have a nice clean-looking raisin chock-full of sleeping-pill powder, and that ought to be enough to put any pheasant to sleep (pp. 91).” Their use of food for bribery allowed them their revenge on the evil Mr. Hazell. Food is actually the form of bribery that I, personally, use most frequently; it’s amazing how much fathers, brothers, and boyfriends will do for fresh, homemade cookies or a steaming chicken pot-pie! I watched my mother get my father to fix countless appliances and cut loads of grass for banana bread. I wonder if men use food to bribe women as well? I haven’t encountered that just yet. However, we find another example of a woman bribing a man with food in Charlotte’s Web. When everyone is going to the fair except Templeton, who says, “I’m staying right here…I haven’t the slightest interest in fairs (pp. 122-123), the old sheep changes his mind by telling him:
A fair is a rat’s paradise. Everybody spills food at a fair. A rat can creep out late at night and have a feast. In the horse barn you will find oats that the trotters and pacers have spilled. In the trampled grass of the infield you will find old discarded lunch boxes containing the foul remains of peanut butter sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, cracker crumbs, bits of doughnuts, and particles of cheese. In the hard-packed dirt of the midway, after the glaring lights are out and the people have gone home to bed, you will find a veritable treasure of popcorn fragments, frozen custard dribblings, candied apples abandoned by tired children, sugar fluff crystals, slated almonds, popsicles, partially gnawed ice cream cones, and the wooden sticks of lollypops. Everywhere there is loot for a rat- in tents, in booths, in hay lofts- why, a fair has enough disgusting leftover food to satisfy a whole army of rats (pp.123).
This disgusting, extremely graphic illustration of a rotting, crumb-laden, deserted fair ground is extremely appealing to a rat, even if not to me, but I find the writing incredible. This was apparently bribery enough for Templeton.
Another way food is used in children’s books is as protection or self-defense. In Ozma of Oz, Tiktok uses the dinner pail Dorothy picks from the dinner tree to fend off the wheelers: “Crack! Went the dinner-pail against its head, knocking its straw hat a dozen feet away (pp. 77).” Later, when they are in the palace of the Nome King, Billina makes it known that she has laid an egg, to which the king responds, “But thunder-ation! Don’t you know that eggs are poison?” Instantly, Billina realizes the potential of the egg and says, “Don’t take the egg unless the King will allow me to enter the palace and guess as the others have done (pp. 207-208).” After Billina has used this advantage to restore the royal family of Ev, the Nome King tries to go back on his promise to let them go free. As a result, the Scarecrow throws one of Billina’s eggs at his head! “Help, help!’ screamed the king, clawing with his fingers at the egg, in a struggle to remove it (pp. 234).” When the Nome King tries one last time to keep them from escaping by unleashing his warriors on them, Dorothy employs food as self-defense once again: “Instantly, the foremost warriors became eggs, which rolled upon the floor of the cavern in such numbers that those behind could not advance without stepping upon them (pp. 244).” Goodness- it’s too bad we didn’t know that eggs repelled tyranny so well when Hitler was still roaming the earth!
Food is a terrific way to show someone that you love him or her, or to comfort him or her after something unpleasant. In Ozma of Oz, Dorothy is very hungry after she wakes up in the chicken coop, so Billina nicely says, “You may have my egg (pp. 27).” Dorothy, who doesn’t eat raw eggs, but doesn’t want to be rude, politely offers it back: “Why don’t you eat the egg? You don’t need to have your food cooked, as I do.” Although Dorothy means this to be very polite, Billina becomes quite upset and asks, “Do you take me for a cannibal?” They were both trying to save the other from discomfort by offering food- unfortunately, it didn’t work out for them that particular time. A bit later, when Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tiktok, Cowardly Lion, and Hungry Tiger are waiting for their turn to go into the palace and guess which trinkets are the royal family, the Nome King orders refreshments to put them at ease:
Dorothy… ate several cakes and found them good, and also she drank a cup of excellent coffee made of a richly flavored clay, browned in the furnaces and then ground fine, and found it most refreshing and not at all muddy (pp. 184).
Although the Nome King is not an overly charming fellow, he seems to be a decent host. In Danny the Champion of the World, Danny’s dad makes him “midnight feasts,” which seem to be tasty meals prepared after what would normally be Danny’s bedtime. Getting food after you’re supposed to be asleep certainly does make the food more special, and in this book, the feasts also seem to occur after an unpleasant discovery, so as to make Danny feel better. The first “Midnight feast” in the book occurs right after Danny finds out that his father is a poacher, on page 31. I think that Danny’s father is afraid that Danny might be disappointed in him, so he tries to make up for it as best he can, which is with food. Also, in families where there is no mother figure, fathers often try to replace love or show love with food, as they have fond memories of their mothers and wives showing them love by way of food. It’s a simple way to make someone feel comfortable and cared for. We see this again when they have another midnight feast right after evil Captain Lancaster hits Danny at school. Later, when Danny’s father falls into the hole and gets hurt, the doctor’s wife, Mrs. Spencer, sends Danny a present:
Very carefully, I now began to unwrap the waxed paper from around the doctor’s present, and when I had finished, I saw before me the most enormous and beautiful pie in the world. It was covered all over, top, sides, and bottom, with rich golden pastry. It was a cold meat pie (pp. 81-82).
The doctor’s wife is trying to bring Danny comfort by doing what his mother might have done, had she been there- feed him. This description of “cold meat pie” is so amazingly mouth-watering that, even though I had no idea what one was, I went on the Internet, found a recipe, and made one myself. For a first try, it wasn’t bad- I think Mrs. Spencer would have approved.
Lastly, sometimes food is just used to add to the whimsicality of a story. My absolute favorite food scene in a children’s book is the one about the lunch and dinner pails in Ozma of Oz. Dorothy, who is simply famished after floating on a chicken coop all night, spots a lunch pail tree: “One [tree] was quite full of square paper boxes, which grew in cluster on all the limbs, and upon the biggest and ripest boxes the word “Lunch” could be read, in neat raised letters (pp. 39).” The best part of the book is the description of what’s inside the lunch pail, as it makes me very hungry!
Inside, she found, nicely wrapped in white papers, a ham sandwich, a piece of sponge-cake, a pickle, a slice of new cheese and an apple. Each think had a separate stem, and so had to be picked off the side of the box; but Dorothy found them all to be delicious, and she ate every bit of luncheon in the box before she had finished (pp. 40)
The other greatest description in the whole book is naturally that of the dinner pail:
In the cover she found a small tank that was full of very nice lemonade. It was covered by a cup, which might also, when removed, be used to drink the lemonade from. Within the pail were three slices of turkey, two slices of cold tongue, some lobster salad, four slices of bread and butter, a small custard pie, an orange and nine large strawberries, and some nuts and raisins (pp. 67).
That’s quite a bit of food to fit in one dinner pail! I certainly wish I had a tree like that; in fact, when I was little, I looked all over gardening stores to try to find one, because I was convinced that the only reason my mom said they weren’t real was because she didn’t want me to stop eating the peanut butter and honey sandwiches she packed me. I’m not sure where the tongue came from, as I don’t recall any cows in Oz (although they didn’t say whose tongue it was…wheeler tongue, perhaps?), but the ridiculous nature of meals on trees makes this book so much more enjoyable.
Eating is certainly one of life’s greatest pleasures, and a big part of the reason that children’s books are so much fun to read is that they feature so much food used so creatively in such different ways. If I ever write a children’s book, it’s going to have breakfast trees in it, because it has always bothered me that I don’t know what’s in the breakfast pails in Oz, if they even exist.
