Dining off Pooh: Recipes of White Childhood Innocence
Title and/or Affiliation
Professor
Presenter Bio
Donna Varga is Professor with the Department of Child and Youth Study, Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax, Canada. Her research focuses on the sociocultural history of material and symbolic children’s culture including the intertwining of representations of colonialism, speciesism, racism and animal representations in children’s media as delineated in and through popular and educational materials. Recent publications include The Coloniality of Animal Monstrous Othering in Children’s Books, Films and Toys (Bloomsbury, 2024).
Session
Critical Perspectives on Pooh
Start Date
11-7-2026 1:45 PM
End Date
11-7-2026 3:00 PM
Abstract
This presentation demonstrates how the White colonialist desire for maintaining childhood innocence as a dominant social paradigm is found in cookbook themes based on Euro-Anglo children’s literature that assure White adults that they can cook up a life free of adult discomforts. Also discussed is how these texts discursively shield Euro-Anglo admirers from acknowledging racist food connotations in children’s stories, such as found in the degradation imposed on the youth servant in Holy Molé!, and with his being characterized as the clumsy, stupid, accidental inventor of the traditional dish. In contrast are recipe-stories highlighting BIPOC defiance against colonialist oppression with narratives linking race, racism, and resistance. Juxtaposing these against ones that reiterate an imagined White virtuousness as embedded in the likes of Winnie-the-Pooh cookbooks expose how White centric children’s literature continues to be a not-so-innocent tool of White supremacy, and in contrast how culinary lessons opposing subjugation impart teachings of decoloniality.
Dining off Pooh: Recipes of White Childhood Innocence
This presentation demonstrates how the White colonialist desire for maintaining childhood innocence as a dominant social paradigm is found in cookbook themes based on Euro-Anglo children’s literature that assure White adults that they can cook up a life free of adult discomforts. Also discussed is how these texts discursively shield Euro-Anglo admirers from acknowledging racist food connotations in children’s stories, such as found in the degradation imposed on the youth servant in Holy Molé!, and with his being characterized as the clumsy, stupid, accidental inventor of the traditional dish. In contrast are recipe-stories highlighting BIPOC defiance against colonialist oppression with narratives linking race, racism, and resistance. Juxtaposing these against ones that reiterate an imagined White virtuousness as embedded in the likes of Winnie-the-Pooh cookbooks expose how White centric children’s literature continues to be a not-so-innocent tool of White supremacy, and in contrast how culinary lessons opposing subjugation impart teachings of decoloniality.