http://www.salon.com/2014/08/31/broc..._to_love_food/

By Sandra M. Gilbert, from her book "The Culinary Imagination: From Myth
to Modernity."

I can hardly choose a paragraph; they're all pretty fun. However (regarding
the Raggedy Ann books):

"...Yet even the cosiness of Cookie Land--one of Johnny Gruelle's most
compelling culinary fantasies--is tainted by dread. In a realm founded
on flour and sugar, appetite is a first principle of society; thus those
who long to eat may themselves have to fear being eaten. The Raggedies
are haunted by the threats of Hookie-the-Goblin, who insists he wants to
make them into noodle soup, despite their very rational assertion that
cloth dolls can't be boiled into noodles. Even more imperiled are the
kindly cookie people. When Raggedy Ann first encounters the chocolate
Cookie Man, he breaks in half, as any vulnerably brittle cookie might,
and she is obliged to glue him together with molasses. Such shattering
shadows all his family all the time: his Lemon Cookie son ends up with a
vanilla leg after his original limb cracks apart; his daughter, little
Strawberry, is stolen by the voracious Hookie, and indeed, the entire
Cookie family, along with their cookie cows, chickens and ducks and
their delicious cookie house, are always threatened by the mouth of
the goblin--and by other hungry mouths that might come along..."

Also mentioned: Maurice Sendak (of course), Lewis Carroll, Tomie
dePaola's Strega Nona, Judi Barrett's Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs,
Henrik Drescher's The Boy Who Ate Around, and Roald Dahl's Charlie and
the Chocolate Factory. Plus (briefly), Little Women, Heidi, Little House
on the Prairie and Farmer Boy.


Lenona.