Wisest Thing I’ve Read Today

From Katherine Rundell’s essay “Why Children’s Books?” in the London Review of Books:

It’s easier to trust a writer who writes great food: they are a person who has paid attention to the world. Children have very little control over what or when they eat, and evolution has given them a sweet tooth far stronger than an adult’s to ensure they consume enough calories during growth spurts – of course their longings are colossal. Fictional food provokes real hunger: it makes the story into a bodily thing. Food is a way to open the door to the space in which the capacity for imaginative and intellectual freedom is built: you lure them in with real appetites.

Perhaps the best book ever written about postwar rationing is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Published in 1964, ten years after rationing ended in Britain, it has an entire nation’s hunger for fresh tastes and wild luxury encoded in its pages.

And there is The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, written in 1950, when sugar and fruit and treats were still scarce (in 1942, according to a survey, many children did not believe that bananas were real): Edmund’s Turkish Delight stands in for every lost and longed-for glory. What child forgets the seismically disappointing discovery that the English version tastes like jellied flowers dusted in soap powder?