Welcome To My Blog

I have desired to look at children's literature and food for some time now and luckily I finally can. I have always enjoyed children’s literature, ever since I was a child I have been read to or tried to read myself. I liked it when main characters were children because they were the same age as me and they seemed to have this freedom to do whatever they wanted to. They took charge and changed their world despite sudden changes. They grew, shrank, turned invisible or transformed entirely into animals, other people or transferred to different dimensions and still they usually saved the day.  

It was often food that initiated a process of transformation in the novels. I think food was something that was focused a lot on when we were children as well. Perhaps we all remember our parents telling us that “if you just eat that green healthy thing on the plate you will grow tall and strong” (at least that’s how it sounded in my head). So perhaps our parents too remembered the stories they read as children and used our imagination against us. Well, anyway over the next couple of weeks I was thinking that this blog should focus on how food is represented in the books below.

v   Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), by Lewis Carol.

v   Asbjørnsen and Moe’s collection of Norwegian tales for children, East of the sun and west of the moon: old tales from the north (1812-1885).

v   George’s Marvellous Medicine (1981) by Roald Dahl.

v  Two of the Harry Potter book series by J.K. Rowling.

v  Hansel and Gretel (1812) by the Brothers Grimm.

 

 

The questions that I will hopefully answer are:

v  Why is the food chosen as the element to change a character?

v  What type of food is represented to change the characters? Is it palatable?

v  Is there a culinary art to it or is it just consumed?

v  Why is the food colourful? Why does it have to be tempting? Why can’t it just be the bread the character had for breakfast?  Or is it the opposite of tempting?

v  How does this representation of food relate to reality?

v  How is the change in a character received by the other characters? Could this these reactions be mirroring how we react to people around us changing reality?

v  What sort of change does the character experience? Is it magical? Visual? Mentally? Dimensional?