10 - Guilty Pleasures in Children’s Literature

Summary

Beginning with Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865) and ending with Levi Pinfold’s Greenling (2015), this chapter contends that children’s literature provides an imaginative map for navigating the global industrial food system, superimposed on colonial circuits of yore. Several narrative dynamics dramatize the appetite and vulnerability of the child’s body. For example, the racialized child is the object of predation in late nineteenth-century US fiction, and then Harlem Renaissance literature repurposes this trope to cherish the black child. In The Secret Garden (1911) and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950), white English children demonstrate and defend their virtue with hearty English repasts. In the postwar period, Green Eggs and Ham (1960) and Where the Wild Things Are (1963) imagine eating as an expression of childhood agency and rebellion. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, picture books reveal the enmeshment of the human and the nonhuman through the ecological intimacies of eating.