A New Food-Related Book for Kids That Taught Me a Few Things Too

Welcome to our Table: A Celebration of What Children Eat Everywhere by Laura Mucha and Ed Smith

Nearly ten years ago, I interviewed Michael Rosen after he had been appointed Professor of Children’s Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, where a new MA in Children’s Literature had just been introduced. He spoke passionately about the relative absence of literary discourse about children’s literature in the review sections of newspapers, magazines, and popular journals (unless they were tried-and-tested classics) and how much poorer we were for it. Food writers and journalists who talk about inclusion in food media cannot persist in ignoring the specific needs of children. There is so much more to this than school dinners and socio-economic policy. The latter is critical, but its domination of the discourse leads one to presuppose that discussing food and children can be preachy or earnestly didactic, dry and rather joyless. This is where children’s literature (fiction and non-fiction) comes in. I have decided to feature it regularly in the hope that we will go on to see more food books for kids reviewed by the mainstream media. Today’s book is Welcome to Our Table: A Celebration of What Children Eat Everywhere by Laura Mucha and Ed Smith, with illustrations by Harriet Lynas. I have spoken to Ed and Laura about their writing process and hopes for the book.

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What we eat should be discussed matter-of-factly and not exoticised or ‘othered’, which can trigger trepidation in a child when presented with something they are unaccustomed to or alienate the child for whom this food is an ordinary, everyday part of their meals. Welcome to Our Table: A Celebration of What Children Eat Everywhere by Laura Mucha and Ed Smith, with illustrations by Harriet Lynas (published 1/6/2023 by Nosy Crow) ) addresses the topic of what is eaten at home (wherever home might be) in a very matter-of-fact way. We need to make space for all kinds of narratives, especially those that approach the subject of what we eat from a position of ‘this is how it already is’, sans the need to defend or justify. Sadly, some food-related media aimed at children fails to prioritise this, which is especially egregious because to eat (however we do it) is a non-negotiable for humans. It is elementally intrinsic. If all this sounds terribly earnest, fear not. Welcome To Our Table is fun and, like the best children’s books, wears its underpinning knowledge and skill base lightly. 'By learning about food, you can learn not only about different countries but also how people have moved around and taken their favourite foods with them’, says the introduction. It meets this brief.

We begin with a section titled ‘What do you use to eat your food?’ where children show us how they use hands and fingers, food as scoops (roti, injera), and combinations of utensils (high-sided flat-bottomed spoons, forks, chopsticks, fork plus spoon, knife, fork and spoon). A sidebar asks the reader what (if anything) is said before a meal in their house and offers some examples. We learn about the amazing abilities of the tongue to detect different flavours, textures and temperatures and how foods like menthol and some spices play tricks on your brain, making it think something cold is hot and vice-versa. Later on in the book, this is developed via sections that zoom in on pickles and ferments (sour), flavour-giving herbs, an exploration of fruity flavours, the smooth creaminess of milk and ice cream, and spices ‘that taste of home’. The section about ice cream gives equal attention to different kinds, too: gelato and soft-serve are not emphasised over mochi, dondurma or kulfi. This is one of the book’s foundational principles. No one national food dominates, and where regions and continents have ingredients in common, there’s a detailed and entertaining exploration of commonality and diversity through the lens of technique (i.e. how various meats are cooked, heat from chillies) and ingredients (the gorgeous ‘An Apple a Day’ and ‘Do You Dig It’ about potatoes, cassava and yams). “I do think we’ve done a decent job of representing a really wide range of cultures and cuisines. And hopefully, that will encourage children to be interested in all sorts of foods, and spark an appetite for exploring and trying new things”, Smith says.

Children's natural fascination for the slurpy, wet, bouncy, sticky and smelly isn’t ignored. (One of the page titles is ‘Superbly Smelly’.) This is a tricky subject to write about but the importance of ‘mouthfeel’ (kougan) in China is discussed via the medium of chicken feet, we read about Sweden’s surströmming, France’s Vieux Boulogne cheese, and Japan’s natto all of which have pungent smells. There’s ‘spongy’ bread and butter pudding, ‘leathery’ biltong that is hard work to eat (when you are little!), ‘spiky’ crisps, ‘slippery, wibbly-wobbly, gummy’ jelly, ‘grainy, crumbly’ halva and boba’s bouncy, springy texture. It’s brilliantly interactive too, encouraging children to think about food as they eat it in a 3D manner. Kids are visceral little creatures not yet possessed of the social inhibition we adults feel around bodily functions - especially noisy ones. So I enjoyed the sounds I had to make when reading this to children. ‘If you want to get to the silky custard in a traditional crème brûlée, you need to shatter the crisp and crunchy top first. SMASH!’ This is a book to be performed and heard, its words should not be confined to the page. (I can tell one of its authors is a poet and the other makes sensate videos about food as part of his foodwriting remit.)

One of the pages that leapt out at me is '‘Lunch On The Go’ which asks, ‘What’s in your packed lunch?’, a question that seems simple at first- but isn’t. Yes, the ‘lunchbox / packed lunch moment’ when children realise their food differs from that of their (white) peers has been criticised as an over-relied-upon trope in food media. As Annu Subramanian says in this interesting Eater piece: “The lunchbox moment’s prevalence '“narrows the frames we can use to tell our stories… I would hate to see someone who doesn’t have any shame around their food see yet another story of bullying because of it and then believe they should be ashamed.”

Explaining one’s food to curious others isn’t necessarily bullying but is one of those experiences some children will never have to navigate. So how does Welcome To Our Table deal with it? Ultimately this is about balancing the tension between the innate curiosity and evolutionary caution that exists in every infant and child and how these interplay with cultural familiarities. There’s an illustration of a Brown child asking, ‘Can I try one of each please?’; each being tempting illustrations and descriptions of Indian Tiffin boxes, Norwegian Matpakke (again, the authors deploy sound, telling children about the rustle of the waxed paper this lunch is packed in), the South Korean Dosirak, and an example of the kind of packed lunch you see in many British schools (sandwiches, yoghurt, crisps etc.). To me, it says that what we eat at lunch outside of the home can reflect what we eat at home — but not always— and that school lunches are but a tiny part of the bigger picture. And the lens is not white, a subtle and important distinction. “We were always of the view that the subject matter of it should be as readable and relatable to a 2-8-year-old in Taiwan, Belgium, Canada or Morocco as it is to one in Worcester, so if it were simply exploring the contents of your basic English supermarket trolley, and from the assumption that those things were the starting point for thinking about food, then it would be a fail”, they tell me.

“Everyone’s experience of food is so personal and so different; we wanted to describe and celebrate *everything* mentioned as if it was exciting and new rather than looking through a familiar British lens and viewing anything outside the norm as alien,” Smith adds. His food writing has a strong multicultural lens, Laura Mucha has Polish heritage, and Harriet Lynas is South Korean. “We also had input from the rights teams who work closely with publishers worldwide and ran things by people from different countries and cultures to be as sensitive as possible throughout.” This all helps. Their aim was always “to travel the world through food, celebrating what it is and how it’s made and eaten. In doing so, we hoped to create a book that would be read by children worldwide… We wanted every child (and adult reading with them) to feel included and never othered. So we were very conscious of this from the very start.”

Phonetic pronunciations are scattered throughout the text in a non-intrusive way and there’s no formal glossary. A lot of the pronunciations are for non-English language words because this is, after all, a book published in English (although they tell me the book is already being translated into multiple languages). Books like this have to balance descriptive names in the original language with universally-adopted names that might have been altered through migration. They need to represent diasporic eating in UK-based families in a relatable way, i.e. ensuring they feel part of the target audience and navigate tension about which country should be linked with what food and why. And that’s before we get to the reading age of the children for whom the book is aimed and its accessibility for adult caregivers. How did they decide which terms and words needed a guide to their pronunciation?

“It wasn’t a completely scientific approach. We mostly asked the question, ‘If it’s not English, and our son asked us how to say that, would we definitely know?’, Smith and Mucha tell me. “It was quite a task, and between us and the team at Nosy Crow, we called on quite a few friends, friends of friends, and colleagues to get native speakers to approve guides for a wide range of languages. Our rule was: ‘If it can’t be approved by a native speaker, it doesn’t go in.’”

Smith and Mucha are married and while they are both published authors who enjoy cooking and eating, we shouldn't assume this jointly-written book had an easier journey into being because of this. There’s a commonly-held belief that children are an easier audience to write for (although I should say that at no point did Smith or Mucha ever intimate this to me) when they are a far tougher crowd to engage and keep engaged. Collaborative working was a learning curve for both of them. Mucha is a best-selling and highly-acclaimed children’s author who is, Smith tells me, ‘a pro at this’ and “brought focus and skill” to his “adult food-writing tendencies.”Smith is an award-winning food writer and cookbook author who found the process of writing a children’s book about food very different.

“I found writing for children to be extremely difficult,” he admits. “To do it well, you need to assume no knowledge, be able to distil and compress everything, accept that you have to lose nuance and detail, and realise that what you think is interesting is often pretty boring to kids. It’s really HARD.” Her feedback, he says, “was quite blunt.”

“I’m used to either writing essays or creating cookbooks, where I know the format as I write (contextual intro, ingredients, method, image of a dish I’ve cooked); even when it’s in simple word document form, I can visualise what the end result will be,” he says. “With this type of children’s book, the text you are writing is often not linear (you’re essentially creating text boxes to be spread across a page), feels basic, and is frequently broken up by your instructions for the illustration. I wasn’t particularly fond of our work product at this stage and couldn’t picture it becoming a joyful reality. HOWEVER, when that copy returned as rough black and white and subsequently colour designs, it was a real pleasure. I think Harriet did a glorious job — she’s really skilled both at drawing children with personalities and character, but also drawing food in a charming yet also accurate way.”

“Writing illustrated books for children is similar to writing for stage or screen – you have to have a very strong sense of not only the words but also what will be seen visually,” Mucha says. (I hadn’t thought about it in these terms.) “You also have to think about visual variety – lots of spreads that look very similar won’t hold a child’s attention, nor the attention of the adult reading with them. So we spent a lot of time thinking about how to present the facts in different ways, e.g. looking underground or under the sea, into a shop selling pickles, and visiting different purveyors of ice cream. I’m really proud of the visual variety in the book.”

Mucha’s visual sense and skill at writing engaging age-appropriate text marries well with Smith’s “encyclopedic knowledge of food — and the fact he thinks about it all the time.” She describes the book as a valuable resource because of Smith’s research and existing knowledge base, a process that might have taken her ‘several decades’ had she been working alone. “And with non-fiction, I feel a strong sense of duty to provide not only the best information possible but also help readers think critically about a subject. In Welcome to Our Table, that meant not just listing delicious foods that look good on the page, but also encouraging readers to think about where food comes from, what it means in terms of culture and tradition, and what it means for the environment. To an extent, this is reflected more by what we left out than put in. We had very long debates about what did and didn’t go in the book on this (we didn’t explicitly include stats on food waste, for example), and writing about this in a meaningful but appropriate way for this age group wasn’t always easy.”

“I hope that the many dishes or new-to-someone ingredients will prompt conversations between parents and children about geography, history, culture, traditions, similarities and differences,” Smith concludes. “Food is such a good starting point for important discussions, not least because it’s so grounding and tangible.”

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Welcome to Our Table: A Celebration of What Children Eat Everywhere written by Laura Mucha and Ed Smith and illustrated by Harriet Lynas is available to pre-order and will go on sale June 1st 2023. (This is a bookshop.org affiliate link which will earn me a small commission if you buy your book from their site.)

Harriet Lynas (Illustrator)

Harriet Lynas is an award-winning children's book illustrator who lives in Hertfordshire with her husband and their son. She has always loved doodling since she was able to hold a pencil and decided to become an illustrator at the age of ten. After studying Visual Communication Design at University, Harriet worked as a graphic designer in the fashion industry before becoming a children's book illustrator. When she is not drawing, she enjoys cooking and country walking. Find her on Instagram.

Laura Mucha (Author)

Laura Mucha is ex-lawyer turned award-winning poet and author. Some of her writing is funny (or at least she hopes it is . . . ), but some is serious and addresses important things that aren't always talked about. She often thinks about how we live and what we can do to make our lives, and the lives of others, a little bit better.

Her writing has won multiple international awards and been featured on TV, radio and public transport, as well as in hospitals, hospices, prisons, books, magazines and newspapers around the world. When she isn't writing, she spends her time visiting schools around the world and working with organisations such as UNICEF to try to improve the lives of children. Laura has travelled to every continent of the world (at least twice!) and now lives in London with her husband (Ed Smith) and son. Find her on Instagram.

Ed Smith (Author)

Ed Smith writes lip-smacking recipes in his cookbooks for adults. He is the acclaimed cookbook author of The Borough Market Cookbook, On The Side, and Crave, which in 2022 was named 'Cookery Book of The Year' at the Fortnum and Mason Food and Drink Awards. Ed also regularly contributes words and recipes to the likes of Waitrose Food and The Sunday Times Magazine, and is prolific on Instagram as @rocketandsquash.