OK, in real life, I don’t think I’ve ever eaten really strange food. However, in books… Now, that’s a different story! Although it seems like a trivial issue, food is a recurrent motif in stories: from the strange, delicious, and mysterious candy house from Hansel and Gretel to Harry Potter’s Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans (which can literally taste like anything from orange to vomit!!), food in stories has incredible and sometimes disastrous consequences.

Food is what makes Alice in Alice and Wonderland grow and shrink. There’s the mysterious Drink-me liquid that makes her little, and there’s also the piece of mushroom that makes her neck incredibly long! If you read Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, you will find chewing gum that tastes like a whole meal (soup, main course, and dessert included). In C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Edmund is tempted by the wicked White Witch with delicious Turkish Delight!

If you have read some of these stories, then you have tasted the strange, magical, sometimes horrible food of these tales!