Recently, I came across an article dividing authors into two camps; those that include descriptions of food and those that don’t. Children’s authors tend to fall into the first camp, often using food as a way of illustrating character, plot and setting in their stories.
Lewis Carrol knew this. If the ‘Mad Hatter’s Tea-party’ in
Alice in Wonderland was a sly dig at the middle-class, he also knew that some foods make us feel safe, as when Alice helped herself to some tea and bread and butter. Others do not, as Alice shrinks and grows, depending on which side of the mushroom she eats.
Poverty can mean hunger. Tom, the chimney sweep in
The Water Babies, cried... when he had not enough to eat, which happened every day in the week... But when he leaves his discarded body behind, he eats water- cresses, perhaps; or perhaps water-gruel and water milk.
Enid Blyton used food in her
Famous Five series to show happiness:
The picnic was lovely. They had it on the top of a hill, in a sloping field that looked down into a sunny valley...The children ate enormously, and Mother said that instead of having a tea-picnic at half-past four they would have to go to a tea-house somewhere, because they had eaten all the tea sandwiches as well as the lunch ones!
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