SOURCE: “Some Uses of Food in Children's Literature,” in Children's Literature in Education, Vol. 11, No. 4, Winter, 1980, pp. 192-99.

In the following essay, Katz presents an overview of the theme of food and its uses in children's literature, focusing on such texts as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and The Hobbit.

When Lewis Carroll's Dormouse begins his story about the three little sisters who lived at the bottom of a well, Alice breaks in almost immediately to ask “What did they live on?”¹ Carroll's narrator, accounting for this curious interruption before the Dormouse's answer of “treacle,” tells us that Alice “always took a great interest in questions of eating and drinking.”² The scene is the mad tea-party in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and questions of eating and drinking, against such a backdrop of tea and bread and butter, appear perfectly natural. Yet Alice, as we know, is a prototypical hero...