Table Lands: Food in Children’s Literature by Kara K. Keeling and Scott T. Pollard

Abstract

Reviewed by: Table Lands: Food in Children’s Literature by Kara K. Keeling and Scott T. Pollard Sarah Minslow (bio) Table Lands: Food in Children’s Literature. By Kara K. Keeling and Scott T. Pollard. University of Mississippi Press, 2020. This is a delightful compilation that extends arguments around food in children’s literature with which Kara Keeling and Scott Pollard have become associated since their 2008 anthology Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature (Routledge). This book focuses on “how food signifies in a sociohistorical context” (5) and engages in numerous interdisciplinary discourses about history, identity, and social hierarchies associated with food: its production, preparation, presentation, and consumption. The intention of the book is to show “how comprehending the sociocultural contexts of food reveals fundamental understandings of the [End Page 210] child and children’s agency,” thus the arguments presented enrich our interpretation of texts as “classic” as Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of the Pie and the Patty-Pan to more contemporary works like Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai. They focus on the classist significance of food in Potter’s works and argue that “food and the complex beliefs, behaviors, and customs that surround it remain fraught and function to illustrate the irresolvable and irreconcilable motives that Potter uses to create her characters and build her plots” (46). Throughout this book, the authors link their interpretations of the food, foodways, and meals in children’s books to arguments of scholars like Paula Connolly, who argues that Pooh is highly motivated by his search for honey. In one of the most interesting chapters, the authors highlight and extend Michelle Pagni Stewart’s analysis of how Louise Erdrich employs the concept of “counting coup” in the Birchbark series. Keeling and Pollard argue that Laura Ingalls Wilder and Erdrich use detailed descriptions of “pioneer and Ojibwe food and food-ways” to “portray these opposing journeys of settlement and displacement” (65). They also explain that Erdrich’s series highlights Native foodways and how they were adapted by pioneers in Wilder’s books even while the pioneers displaced indigenous people from the land on which they lived and depended for survival. The first chapter is dedicated to exploring the history of cookbooks written for American kids and how they reflect “a changing set of adults’ expectations of skills based on shifting ideologies of child capability” (7). They trace the Victorian stereotype of Coventry Patmore’s “the angel in the house” in 1920s cookbooks aimed at young girls’ initiation into domesticity through to later cookbooks that provided a more subversive space where “ordinary women could record their subjectivity and network it with other women” during a time when women’s writings (and voices) were marginalized (17). This chapter also shows how American culinary traditions were passed down through generations and became “repositories of generational memory and knowledge” until they changed significantly after World War II, when “the availability of industrialized foods fed a growing appetite for convenience” (19). They also showcase more contemporary cookbooks by Molly Katzen and Alice Waters that emphasize and value child agency and promote healthy, sustainable foods. The link between food and cultural identity and history is sustained throughout Table Lands. Their analysis of Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen focuses on how it “uses the city of food to portray ethnic Jewish experiences set within the mainstream American culture” and represents “the tensions between assimilation and integration, forgetting and remembering, inclusion and alienation that shaped Jewish cultural identity for generations” (92). Further in the chapter on Rita Williams-Garcia’s books, Keeling and Pollard highlight how “each place is marked by distinctive foods and foodways that reflect the particular historical moments of African American culture of that time and place: the Black Power movement [End Page 211] in Oakland in 1968, the Great Migration in Brooklyn as it adapts to post-World War II convenience culture, and the Jim Crow American South” (144). In the chapter on Pixar’s film Ratatouille, the authors argue that viewers are invited “to value the subjectivity of characters that could be defined as Other,” in this case, a rat in the kitchen (124). Digging into the sociohistorical contexts...