The picture book diet: representations of food and food practices in contemporary Australian picture books

Abstract

In children’s picture books, representations of food and food practices are central and recurrent in the ways in which stories are told on the page. Book creators frequently use food-related references to define character identity, as well as to determine the physical, social and cultural contexts in which the characters and narratives of the books operate. These representations draw on the fact that food is a basic signifying element in a child’s world and food-related practices constitute one of the key ways in which adults communicate a wide range of social, cultural and behavioural norms. The centrality of food in children’s lives and in child–adult relations is evidenced by a vocabulary of textual and illustrative references based on food and our relationships to food that constitute what I call the picture book diet. Focusing on a corpus of 170 shortlisted, award-winning and bestselling Australian picture books published between 2000 and 2013, the thesis examines this vocabulary in detail, exploring the ways in which food depictions, both featured and incidental (those providing context or background to setting or characterisation), acquire meaning and value. It brings together semiotic analysis with aspects of thing theory (in particular the material agency of food and of the book itself) in a consideration of the textual and extratextual elements that coalesce in the moment of reading to shape meaning. In the worlds created in picture books, food and food practices can be seen to provide the maximum signification for the minimum of signifying. By interrogating these significations, certain meanings and values, formulated within a genre-specific system that I refer to as the economy of the picture book diet, can be seen to be reiterated across the corpus. These expose the picture book genre’s capacity to encode and promote a range of cultural values and assumptions relating to identity, sense of place and social cohesion. While food references in picture books may not always be directly linked to real world uses and assumptions, the capacity for this food-based vocabulary to communicate meaning relies on the richness of those associations and shared cultural codes between book creators and readers. The analyses in the thesis reveal a range of perhaps unintended correlations and alignments between food and cultural identity, place, family dynamics, gender and sense of self. Many of the cultural assumptions involving food types and food practices embedded in these texts reinforce notions of what, why and how we eat that are currently being questioned in contemporary society in relation to ethnicity, gender and public health. This research offers a contribution towards better understanding what it is we are feeding our children when we read them a book.