Children’s Literature, Food, and Identity in Times of Crisis and Change: A Literary-Historical Approach

Abstract

The last three decades have witnessed the development of studies of food in children’s literature. The expansion of this particular area within children’s literature studies stems from a combination of factors. From a scientific viewpoint, over this period of time children’s literature studies and food studies underwent significant development and consolidation as research areas in their own right. In all likelihood, this happy coincidence contributed to a surge of interest among children’s literature scholars in the significance of eatables in children’s stories: indeed, from a narrative standpoint, food has a crucial role in stories aimed at a primary child audience. And last, but definitely not least and certainly related to the factors listed above, interest in food and eating in children’s literature also depends on the simple fact that, for a wide range of reasons, all human cultures share an interest in food. It is indeed a widely accepted notion among researchers involved in food studies to any degree that, in Massimo Montanari’s words, ‘food is culture’ (2006). Given that food is such a powerful component of an individual’s cultural identity, what happens when it is no longer possible to access food, in general, and food constituting ‘my’ culture, in particular? And what role does food have in building new cultural, national, and individual identities? Over the last few years, the COVID pandemic impacted on underprivileged constituencies’ access to food and on how cultures all over the world related to food and nutrition; war events, of which the war in Ukraine is the most recent example, provoke the uprooting of whole communities, with consequent lack of access to food, especially to food that is part of these communities’ cultural identity. In the wake of events such as these, it becomes important to consider the questions above, especially when children are involved, because of their limited physical power and political and bodily autonomy. Childhood and Food: Literary-Historical Perspectives (c. 19-20th centuries) tackles these questions, looking at how literature for and about children represented the connection between food, children, and cultural identity at moments of dramatic social, cultural, and economic change over the last two centuries. In her seminal article ‘Some uses of food in children’s literature’, Katz (1980) wrote: ‘understand the relations between the child and food,... and you understand the workings of the world of the young’. ‘An examination of what’s eaten, by whom, when, and where’, she continues, ‘gives one a portrait of children’s manners, problems, and