Critical Approaches to Food in Children's Literature

Kara K. Keeling, Scott T. Pollard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781135893002
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Critical Approaches to Food in Children's Literature is the first scholarly volume on the topic, connecting children's literature to the burgeoning discipline of food studies. Following the lead of historians like Mark Kurlansky, Jeffrey Pilcher and Massimo Montanari, who use food as a fundamental node for understanding history, the essays in this volume present food as a multivalent signifier in children's literature, and make a strong argument for its central place in literature and literary theory.

Written by some of the most respected scholars in the field, the essays between these covers tackle texts from the nineteenth century (Rudyard Kipling's Kim) to the contemporary (Dave Pilkey's Captain Underpants series), the U.S. multicultural (Asian-American) to the international (Ireland, Brazil, Mexico). Spanning genres such as picture books, chapter books, popular media, and children's cookbooks, contributors utilize a variety of approaches, including archival research, cultural studies, formalism, gender studies, post-colonialism, post-structuralism, race studies, structuralism, and theology. Innovative and wide-ranging, Critical Approaches to Food in Children's Literature provides us with a critical opportunity to puzzle out the significance of food in children's literature.

Part I
Introduction

Chapter One
Introduction: Food in Children’s Literature

Kara K. Keeling and Scott T. Pollard

Food Is Everywhere

• But he struck his chest and curbed his fighting heart:
  “Bear up, old heart! You’ve borne worse, far worse,
  that day when the Cyclops, man-mountain, bolted
  your hardy comrades down. But you held fast—
  Nobody but your cunning pulled you through
  the monster’s cave you thought would be your death.”

• So he forced his spirit into submission,
  the rage in his breast reined back—unswerving,
  all endurance. But he himself kept tossing, turning,
  intent as a cook before some white-hot blazing fire
  who rolls his sizzling sausage back and forth,
  packed with fat and blood—keen to broil it quickly,
  tossing, turning it, this way, that way.

(Homer, The Odyssey, Book 20, lines 20–31)

At the beginning of Book 20, Odysseus cannot sleep for the anger that he feels. An insomniac lying in the entranceway of his own house, he is tempted to simply rise up and attack the suitors then and there, disgusted by their abuse of his household (e.g., the butchering of Odysseus’s stock of pigs and hogs for their perpetual feasting), but he represses that urge in order to give his cunning the time it needs to devise an attack. He thinks about an analogous moment—Polyphemous eating his crew—when he successfully strategized and executed a plan to save himself and the rest of his men from becoming food. Food leads to food. His anger successfully repressed (food memory as defense mechanism), Odysseus will not let it die out, though, and he keeps himself awake, “tossing, turning.” At which point, Homer introduces another food moment, this time as a simile. Odysseus is the cook grilling the sausage, which is also Odysseus, “tossing, turning.” He is the cook and the cooked, subject and object, a closed circuit meant to embody Odysseus’s management of his anger. As with all cooks, the keys to his success are ingredients, heat, and timing. The cook Odysseus has a hot fire and a well-stuffed sausage, and he has the skill “to broil it quickly” (but not too quickly) in order to serve up his anger to the suitors, with the “fat and blood” at its peak, ready to burst out of the skin. But Odysseus’s fire is too hot, and Athena appears to cool his anger and assure him of his revenge:

• Even if fifty bands of mortal fighters
  Closed around us, hot to kill us off in battle,
  Still you could drive away their herds and sleek flocks. (lines 49–51)

Odysseus is promised that he will control the suitors’ food stocks. In fifty-one lines, in the lead-up to the climax of The Odyssey, the slaying of the suitors, food and food preparation dominate Homer’s language as he attempts to capture Odysseus’s mindset.

We see here in one of the earliest texts of world literature the integral role of food as cultural signifier, not only the product of a culture but one that gives shape to the mentalités that structure thought and expression. The presence of food, food production, and scenes of eating and feasting—all thread through the epic. One can read the epic as an adventure tale, but food is fundamental to the plot and to character interactions, to the very propelling of the adventure forward throughout the story: the ritual barbecues, the feasts, the slaughtering of bulls and pigs and sheep and, occasionally, humans. Polyphemous, whom Odysseus remembers at this crucial moment, kills and eats Odysseus’s crew, but until Odysseus’s arrival he is primarily a dairy farmer who raises sheep for their milk, out of which he makes cheese. He is a pastoralist who inexplicably turns cannibal.

Readers can take literature from practically any period or cultural tradition and do this kind of analysis about food. In Gilgamesh, Enkidu is inducted into civilization through eating cooked food. In The Iliad, Priam and Achilles negotiate the release of Hector’s body over a meal. In The Metamorphoses, Ovid advocates vegetarianism. In the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer distinguishes the Prioress from the other pilgrims by her delight in good manners, signified by her dainty eating habits. In Gargantua and Pantagruel, Rabelais delights in using food as a positive sign of excess for the vast intellectual and physical capacities of his main characters. Gustave Flaubert spends an entire chapter on the wedding feast in Madame Bovary. Marcel Proust’s six-volume Remembrance of Things Past is launched by the memory of a cookie.

These are just a few examples; more will occur to any thoughtful reader who reviews his or her repertoire of texts, including those read in childhood. Food is as prevalent and significant in children’s literature as it is in literature for any other audience. Taking, for example, Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, Mickey’s situation is similar to that of Odysseus: Mickey too is an outsider trying to find his way in. Although he is not angry, as Odysseus is, he is still frustrated at his subordinate, marginalized social position. Whereas Odysseus feels homicidal because his rightful position of power has been usurped, Mickey quests for a new position of power. It is through food—through negotiating his liminal position of cook and almost cooked—that Mickey succeeds. Mickey does not live in a world of threatening suitors; rather, he inhabits a fantastic dreamscape of early twentieth-century commercially prepared staples (bottles of cream of tartar and baking soda, bags of sugar and flour, containers of salt, yeast, and coffee), a dreamscape created from the adult world from which he has so far been excluded. He desires to be coequal with these avatars of the adult world, and it is as both prepared food and as food preparer that Mickey dreams his inclusion. To mix our metaphors, it is in his ability to walk the fine line between those roles that Mickey is able to embrace his rightful position as consumer of a product of whose production he has dreamed himself a part. In the end he has become the knowledgeable consumer who understands from where this food comes and how it is made. As the final illustration of the book suggests, as hero of the tale Mickey becomes the brand, the Mickey-cake, that everyone eats, achieving power not through homicide but through economic ingenuity, through the negotiation and navigation of a food production and distribution system.

Food Is Fundamental to Literature

Food is important. In fact, nothing is more basic. Food is the first of the essentials of life, our biggest industry, our biggest export, and our most frequently indulged pleasure. Food means creativity and diversity. As a species, humans are omnivores; we have tried to eat virtually everything on the globe, and our ability to turn a remarkable array of raw substances into cooked dishes, meals, and feasts is evidence of astounding versatility, adaptability, and aesthetic ingenuity. (Belasco viii)

If food is fundamental to life and a substance upon which civilizations and cultures have built themselves, then food is also fundamental to the imagination and the imaginary arts. Food is fundamental to the imagination, because food is fundamental to culture, or as Massimo Montanari puts it in the title of his latest book, Food Is Culture. If food were plain—if it were nothing more than bland nutrition—perhaps we could leave it to the scientists and technicians to know how nutrition works and to deliver it more efficiently, in pills, for example. But food is seldom plain. Cultures and civilizations will not leave it alone. Cultures elaborate it, not simply as Lévi-Strauss speaks of “elaboration” in “The Culinary Triangle”—the transformation of food from the raw to the cooked—but through its inclusion in cultural rituals, its purpose as cultural signifier, its central position in the creation of culture. Food is also essential to the cultural imagination, or the imagination period. Thus food proliferates as the product of the imagination. As we have already indicated above, food and foodways are a constant thread in literature. Food can be epic in scope, and it can be intimate. It can give bent to joy or anger or mark humankind’s mortality.

Food has not always been deemed a subject worthy of literary study, despite its omnipresence in literature. In his autobiography, The Apprentice, Jacques Pépin recollects his desire as a graduate student in the 1970s to write his doctoral dissertation on Flaubert’s description of the wedding feast in Madame Bovary, but his advisor in the French Department at Columbia nixed the idea, telling Pépin “the reason not much has been written on the topic … is that cuisine is not a serious art form. It’s far too trivial for academic study. Not intellectual enough to form the basis of a Ph.D. thesis.” The rejection of his proposal pushed Pépin out of an academic career and back into his first love of food preparation as a chef (Pépin 212). But by 1984 one finds James Brown noting in Fictional Meals and Their Function in the French Novel: 1789–1848 that “Fictional meals are above all literary signs: consequently they are subject to the same kinds of analysis as any other literary phenomenon” (3).

To better understand the potential for studying food in literature, a brief overview of the development of food studies in the last century is needed. The three fields that have been the primary contributors to food studies have been social sciences (anthropology, sociology, and history), though the field is inherently interdisciplinary and has come to include the arts and humanities as well. But there is little sense of food studies as an interdisciplinary field of its own until long after studies of food had developed in the individual disciplines. Thus in 1999 the field still seems very new, and a certain defensiveness is still noticeable in its early practitioners. In his review of the field that year, “Why Food Matters,” Warren Belasco, an influential scholar in the development of food studies, admits his defensiveness about the scholarship he does, noting the “bemused wonder” of other academics in reaction to his work. But Belasco also shows the breadth of the developing field, offering a bibliography of sixty-eight works from the 1920s onwards that covers multiple fields and many varieties of writing, ranging from the impact of food on body image to food history to cookbooks and gastronomic literature. In 2002 an even more comprehensive literature review of food studies, “The Anthropology of Food and Eating,” was published. In it Sidney Mintz and Christine Du Bois observe “the staggering increase in the scale of food literature—inside and outside anthropology” (111). They claim that food studies in anthropology began at the end of the nineteenth century but developed most significantly after Claude Lévi-Strauss and Mary Douglas wrote about food and foodways in the mid-1960s. The important turning point came, though, in 1982 with the publication of Jack Goody’s Cooking, Cuisine, and Class: A Study in Comparative Sociology, after which work in the anthropology of food grew exponentially. Mintz and Du Bois’s bibliography cites 233 articles and books on food and foodways; clearly this had already become a productive subfield that has only continued to develop since then. They argue that there are three major trends responsible for the growth of food scholarship: “globalization; the general affluence of Western societies and their growing cosmopolitanism; and the inclusivist tendencies of U.S. society which spurs … disciplines … and professions, such as journalism and business … to consider cross-cultural variations in foodways” (111).

In the field of history, food becomes an important focus with the French historian Fernand Braudel and the French Annales school of history. In The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible, the first volume of his three-volume history, Civilization and Capitalism: 15th–18th Century, Braudel focuses on the material components of the lives of ordinary people (as opposed to the Great Man or political theories of history), in which he has chapters on bread, rice, maize, potatoes, eating habits, etcetera. Stephen Mennell, in the introduction to All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present, notes that Braudel called for a history of food in 1961 (17). Since then, a variety of comprehensive food histories have been written, most notably Reay Tannahill’s Food and History (1973), Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat’s History of Food (1987), Jean-Louis Flandrin, et al.’s Food: A Culinary History (1996), and Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s Near a Thousand Tables: A Brief History of Food (2002). A number of histories of specific foods, such as Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1986) and Mark Kurlansky’s Salt: A World History (2002), have received popular acclaim.

A key moment in the development of food studies in the humanities was the founding of Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, which began publishing in 2001. Although other publications devoted to food existed (Food, Culture & Society and Food History News), they were oriented toward social sciences rather than the arts and humanities. Gastronomica’s stated goals include “promoting greater recognition and awareness for the field of food studies”; they explicitly proclaim food studies as an existing field of its own, deserving of its own journal, in which they feature a wide variety of interdisciplinary scholarly and general audience articles. Any issue may include pieces on art, photography, poetry, creative nonfiction, memoir, testimonial, restaurants, table manners, utensils, chef biographies, historical events, and current controversies, all of which explore the pervasiveness of food in cultures around the world and are captured under the umbrella of food studies. In reviewing all the issues of Gastronomica, we find literature is the focus of a number of pieces. A scattering of titles includes “Roman Food Poems: A Modern Translation,” “The Duchess of Malfi’s Apricots, and Other Literary Fruits,” and “Scenes of the Apple: Food and the Female Body in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Women’s Writing”; these articles suggest food’s omnipresence in literature, yet it remains an area ripe for analysis and commentary. Gastronomica has also given space to discussions about food in children’s lives and children’s culture. Among all the disciplines to which it gives voice, Gastronomica provides a central outlet for analyses of food in literature; this is much needed, given that although many analyses of food in literature are being produced, there is no strong venue devoted to the topic. The field is now at the point that we need studies exclusively devoted to food and literature.

Some of the most important literary and cultural theorists have addressed food and literature. Perhaps the most outstanding is Mikhail Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World, which Carolyn Korsmeyer in Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy sees as “Bakhtin’s meditations” on food as “a metaphor for power” that focus particularly on Rabelais’s “trope of appetite to ferocious excess” (188). In Mythologies Rol...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• PART I Introduction
• PART II Reading as Cooking
• PART III Girls, Mothers, Children
• PART IV Food and the Body
• PART V Global/Multicultural/Postcolonial Food
• PART VI Through Food the/a Self
• Contributors