If we truly are what we eat, what does the food we read about say about us? That’s a question explored in the book Scott Pollard ’81 and his wife, Kara Keeling, just published.
In Table Lands, the English professors explore food in children’s stories: from Ratatouille to the pies in Beatrix Potter’s tales to the honey favored by one Winnie the Pooh. In Wonderland, Alice has her elixirs, potions to make her big or small. In Where the Wild Things Are, a dinner that is still hot could well be the love of a little boy’s mother. And then, of course, there are children’s books in which monsters want to eat up the young heroes themselves.
But why? What do all of these tales of food say about us? Pollard and Keeling, both English professors at Christopher Newport University in Virginia, explore the ways food in children’s stories speaks about culture, economic status, and a child’s place in the world. The book takes this exploration a step further than the idea that we are what we eat.
“Children’s literature, after all, is full of young people trying to figure out who they are,” the pair writes. So we also are, in a way, the food we grow up reading about. The food eaten by the animals in Beatrix Potter’s stories, for example, is not just temptingly yummy, but speaks of social economic status and the desperation of poverty. There is, of course, culture around food, too—how one cooks and how one eats; is bread broken with family or in extended community?