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It is probably in tastes in food that one would find the strongest and most indelible mark of infant learning, the lessons which longest withstand the distancing or collapse of the native world and most durably maintain nostalgia for it.
-Pierre Bourdieu (79)
If, with the wolf at the door, there is not very much to eat, the child should know it, but not oppressively. Rather, he should be encouraged to savor every possible bite with one eye on its agreeable nourishment and the other on its fleeting but valuable esthetic meaning.
-M. F. K. Fisher (165)
Food is the most personally powerful object of barter. Atalanta lost the race for a few gold apples. Paris gave the coveted apple to Venus, unleashing a chain of events that would wreak havoc on Troy. Food is also the currency of childhood, our first initiation into the string-pulling power of parenthood. Judeo-Christian myth has it that innocence was bartered for an apple and paid in full. Apparently because of Adam's and Eve's sinful bites, parents have to keep that "bun in the oven," "earn the daily bread," and "bring home the bacon." Baby is just supposed to learn how to chew and swallow. Myth reflects that the most vital, and thus powerful, means of manipulating human bodies is through food. And we start pulling strings from day one.
As Claude Lévi-Strauss writes in From Honey to Ashes, "the world of mythology is round, and therefore does not refer back to any necessary starting point" (foreword, n. pag.). I intend to navigate a playful genealogy of food lures (especially gingerbread) in light of this nonlinearity, however, with much skipping about in order to demonstrate range of relevance.11 hope to show that gingerbread represents just one of many food lures that are symbolically pervasive in folktales, fairy tales, and cautionary tales, one for which a material history is known, and one that can serve as analogous to all symbols of temptation in industrializing and consumerist cultures, which create a cultural climate that is protectionist, pacifying/passifying, and infantilizing toward children.
Food lures convey cultural expectations and challenges, providing fictive opportunities for self-expression or disempowerment. Their power to manipulate becomes subtler in industrial and postmodern tales where child characters are even...