Food Places in Children’s Literature: Kitchens, Sweetshops, Restaurants

Food Places in Children’s Literature analyses how food, place and social interactions are intertwined in children’s and young adult novels. This book sets out to analyse a range of children’s books from across the 20th and 21st centuries, each of which relate to specific kinds of places, from the kitchen to the restaurant to the ad hoc picnic place, by using selected spatial theories, but also considering, for example, theories of communication. Examining how food is an object of material culture and shapes identities in a way similar to places, the book explores what happens when food and place meet and become intertwined within children’s narratives. This book is for scholars, academics, and postgraduate students in the arts and humanities with a special focus on children’s literature and media (literature, film and media studies) as well as academics and students with a special interest in food studies.

Sabine Planka, Dr. phil., works as an academic librarian at the Martin-Opitz-Library (Herne, Germany) in the field of public relations and event/project management, and as a visiting lecturer at Bielefeld University (Bielefeld, Germany) in the field of children’s literature. Her research particularly focuses on children’s literature, cookbook literature and literary food studies. She is also interested in aspects of space and gender theory as well as film studies. Latest publications include, for example, Cultural Perspectives on Sweets in Children’s Literature and Media (2025, edited by Sabine Planka and Corina Löwe); ＂What and How Will We Eat in Future? Food Culture, Food System, and Food Memory in Cli-fi Novels for Young Adults＂ (2024, together with Corina Löwe), and ＂Meet to Eat. The Restaurant as Narrative Setting in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985) and The Fisher King (1991)＂ in A Critical Companion to Terry Gilliam (2023) edited Sabine Planka, Philip van der Merwe, and Ian Bekker.