![\"everlasting_gobstopper\"](\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/tatar\/files\/2014\/09\/everlasting_gobstopper1.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nSandra Gilbert’s book,\u00a0The Culinary Imagination:From Myth to Modernity<\/em>, has been excerpted in\u00a0Salon.com. \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n http:\/\/www.salon.com\/2014\/08\/31\/broccoli_gross_more_candy_please_willy_wonka_childrens_literature_and_how_we_learn_to_love_food\/<\/p>\n Children\u2019s books revel in the romance of food\u2014and\u00a0why not? When the\u00a0baby is weaned from her first desire, the loss of the breast\u2014with\u00a0(if all goes\u00a0well) its apparently ceaseless satisfactions\u2014promotes\u00a0further aspirations: the\u00a0endless pleasures of Cockayne, the walls of sugar, the wells of delight, the\u00a0spouts of syrup. Even before I read about such goodies in the Raggedy Ann\u00a0and Andy stories\u2014the\u00a0Deep Deep Woods with its lollipop plants and Cookie\u00a0Land with its sugar-frosted\u00a0family and raisin-stuffed\u00a0cake chickens\u2014my\u00a0father used to charm me with comparable tales. He was a man who loved the\u00a0soda fountain at Schrafft\u2019s and often took me there to indulge in Broadway\u00a0sodas (chocolate syrup, coffee ice cream, vanilla soda, a hint of mint) and big\u00a0flat cookies that looked almost like the smiley heads of the Raggedies. \u201cImagine,\u00a0Sandra,\u201d he\u2019d say, \u201ca land with ice cream mountains and chocolate rivers\u00a0and candy bushes. . . .\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Gilbert’s writing is like a banquet–rich, colorful, and full of surprises–and she captures both culinary delight and dread of appetite in children’s books.<\/p>\n We imagine children\u2019s books as cosy, and so they often are, yet at the same\u00a0time their cosiness compels because the strongest tales acknowledge the dread\u00a0that always shadows comfort. To be sure, quite a few kids\u2019 classics are realistic\u00a0in the usual sense of the word. From Louisa May Alcott\u2019s\u00a0Little Women\u00a0and\u00a0Johanna Spyri\u2019s\u00a0Heidi\u00a0to Laura Ingalls Wilder\u2019s\u00a0Little House on the Prairie\u00a0and\u00a0Farmer Boy, novelists represent children eating muffins, drinking goat\u2019s\u00a0milk, gobbling apple turnovers in settings that are grounded in history and\u00a0society\u2014landscapes\u00a0far less unlikely than the exotic places inhabited by Charlie,\u00a0Mickey and the Raggedies. Yet these books too feature dream meals and\u00a0dwell on the dangers of hunger, one\u2019s own hunger and the hungers of others.\u00a0Lurking behind their quotidian scenes, as behind the gastronomic scenes\u00a0in so many contemporary narratives, are both the satisfactions of primordial\u00a0desires and the perils of the oven from which Hansel and Gretel escape but\u00a0into which they shove the wicked witch, the deadly stickiness of candy, the\u00a0grinding teeth of the machines that pulverize cacao beans\u2014along\u00a0with nasty\u00a0little boy has-beens\u2014into\u00a0fudge, the glug-glug\u00a0of the milk bottle out of which\u00a0one might or might not rise into a milky way of one\u2019s own. In this fashion, the\u00a0ambiguity of our first kitchens prepares us for the complex imaginings of the\u00a0good, bad and weird flavors of kitchens to come in adulthood.<\/em><\/p>\n \n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sandra Gilbert’s book,\u00a0The Culinary Imagination:From Myth to Modernity, has been excerpted in\u00a0Salon.com. \u00a0 http:\/\/www.salon.com\/2014\/08\/31\/broccoli_gross_more_candy_please_willy_wonka_childrens_literature_and_how_we_learn_to_love_food\/ Children\u2019s books revel in the romance of food\u2014and\u00a0why not? When the\u00a0baby is weaned from her first desire, the loss of the breast\u2014with\u00a0(if all goes\u00a0well) its apparently ceaseless satisfactions\u2014promotes\u00a0further aspirations: the\u00a0endless pleasures of Cockayne, the walls of sugar, the wells of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2125,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2805","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2805","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2125"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2805"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2805\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2808,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2805\/revisions\/2808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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