An Invitation to the Table

Abstract

Children’s literature is filled with foods to eat, reflecting the pleasure humans take in taste, which occurs as much in the mind as in the body. Food studies as a field has grown since the 1990s, crossing boundaries from the social sciences into the sciences. Within literary studies, work has shifted from seeing food as a literary trope to using material culture as an approach to what food signifies in a socio-historical context. Table Lands is a broad survey of food’s function in children’s texts, showing how comprehending the socio-cultural contexts of food reveals fundamental understandings of the child and children’s agency and enriches the interpretation of such texts. In roughly chronological order, it examines a variety of texts from historical to contemporary, non-canonical to classics—many from the Anglo American tradition but enriched by several books from multicultural traditions (Native American, Jewish American, African American, and immigrant Vietnamese)—and including a variety of genres, formats, and age-group audiences. These include realism (both historical and contemporary), fantasy, cookbooks, picture books, chapter books, young adult novels, and film.