The Taste of Authoritarian: Food Spaces as Sites of Control

This study examines the transformation of food spaces in children’s literature under authoritarian rule, analysing how sites of food consumption and production become contested political terrain that shapes young protagonists’ daily experiences and identity formation. While food symbolism in children’s literature has received scholarly attention, the spatial dimensions of food culture, specifically how physical locations of eating and food procurement function as sites of political control, remain underexplored. Through examination of three picturebooks depicting childhood under distinct authoritarian regimes, Peter Sís’s The Wall (2007), Antonio Skármeta and Alfonso Ruano’s The Composition (2000), and Na Liu and Andrés Vera Martínez’s Little White Duck (2012), this research explores how oppressive governments infiltrate and reshape the most intimate spaces of daily sustenance. These texts represent geographically and temporally diverse contexts: Communist Czechoslovakia, Pinochet’s Chile, and Mao’s China during the Cultural Revolution. Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s distinction between “strategies” and “tactics” in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), this study conceptualises authoritarian control over food spaces as systematic strategies while examining child characters’ everyday practices as potential tactics of resistance. However, this theoretical application raises critical questions about children’s capacity for conscious political resistance. The research further interrogates Václav Havel’s notion of “living in truth” (1989), the practice of maintaining independent social life “as if the regime did not exist”, to examine whether such deliberate political resistance is feasible for children whose cognitive and social development remains incomplete. Recent scholarship on food in children’s literature suggests that culinary practices can function as vehicles for cultural identity and resistance beyond mere sustenance (Keeling & Pollard, 2020). The analysis proceeds along four interconnected axes. First, I examine how domestic dining spaces, traditionally sites of family intimacy, become arenas of political tension where conversations are monitored and familial bonds strained. Second, I analyse the transformation of public food venues such as markets and stores into spaces of surveillance, scarcity, and state control. Third, I investigate how food itself becomes politicised, functioning simultaneously as propaganda tool and site of resistance. Finally, I consider how child narrators navigate these transformed landscapes, revealing both their vulnerability to political manipulation and their capacity for subtle acts of defiance. By testing the applicability of de Certeau’s theory of everyday practices in childhood contexts and questioning the feasibility of Havel’s living in truth for children, this research seeks to provide new theoretical perspectives for the study of political resistance in children’s literature. Preliminary findings suggest that children’s “tactics” possess unique characteristics that blend instinctive responses with learned resistance behaviours, while their version of living in truth often depends on adult protection and guidance, indicating that traditional adult-centric resistance theories may need to be reexamined and revised within the context of childhood studies.