“A Little Smackerel of Something”

The narratives of A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner serve collectively as a Künstlerroman—a narrative about an artist’s growth—and Pooh’s development as poet is structured around three nodes: food, sociability, and creativity. Pooh’s obsession with food, especially honey, is not mere oral greed: his desire for food in company is frequently linked to his practice and performance of poetry. Using anthropologist Mary Douglas’s analysis of meal structure, which encodes social relationships and creates social boundaries through food meanings within individual meals, this chapter examines how the metonymic triad of food, social connections, and creativity structure the social relations among the animals. Meals and food provide the occasions for this triad to operate: both formal meals (the banquet in Winnie-the-Pooh) and lighter meals (such as “elevenses” and teas). The meals and food provide occasions within the pastoral setting of the Hundred Acre Woods for Pooh to develop his poetic art, from spontaneous hums to his heroic epic about Piglet.