What, Why, and How: Curiosity About the World

How Did That Get in my Lunchbox?: The Story of Food by Chris Butterworth, illustrated by Lucia Gaggiotti.
Copyright 2011 by Candlewick Press. Ages 5-8; Lexile level 740

If you’ve spent any time around young children, you know they ask questions. A lot. Like, every other breath. And if that’s not the perfect age to get them into the habit of consulting books for answers, I don’t know what is. How Did That Get in my Lunchbox?: The Story of Food is a great example of a book that can start kids off on that path.

As implied by the title, this charming work traces the processes that a handful of popular lunchtime foods go through to arrive at a store, from bread to cheese, from carrots to chocolate. Butterworth seems indecisive on when to use proper terminology and when to simply describe - a greenhouse is only called a “big plastic tunnel” while “combine harvester” is used without additional describing words - but otherwise the vocabulary is simple and the language natural.

What really shines here is the author’s generous use of tactile adjectives throughout each food process; chocolate is “sticky” and “gritty” before it becomes “really smooooooth,” “fat, ripe grains” are made into “soft, squishy” dough before being baked into bread, and clementines start as “sweet-smelling, waxy” flowers. Each spread is capped off with a tantalizing description of the food’s flavor - cheese is “creamy” and “tingly,” carrots “sweet” and “crunchy” - that honestly makes the book a bit dangerous to read if you’re already hungry!

With descriptions like that, illustrations almost feel unnecessary - but Gaggiotti's work here still adds much to the book’s quality. The colorful, attractive style strikes a balance between simplicity and depicting the details needed to support the text. The font choice is also appealing, combining rounded letters with crisp readability. Even the visual flow of the layout works in the reader’s favor; though numbers and arrows are occasionally used for clarity, images and text are generally arranged so that reading them in the correct order is almost intuitive.

How Did That Get in my Lunchbox? is a solid choice for introducing any sort of food topic, though its use for teaching nutrition is further supported with an illustrated plate depicting all the food groups.

In the classroom, this book could very easily be extended into an activity in which kids research the source of their own favorite food and create a poster to share with their classmates what they’ve found. (Be warned, though, that none of the foods described here include meat - there’s no help to be found here for explaining that the tasty bacon they eat for breakfast was once a pig.)

Now then, who’s ready for lunch?

Information in Images: Graphic Non-fiction

Dogs: From Predator to Protector by Andy Hirsch. Copyright 2017 by First Second. Ages 9-13; Lexile level 820.

How many of us in library work have witnessed a child pick out a graphic novel, only for a parent to tell them they need to pick out a “real book?” Thankfully, these adults seem to be the exception nowadays, and every year graphic novels are more accepted and celebrated by librarians and educators. And their popularity among readers of all ages certainly can’t be denied! Given their appeal, it’s almost surprising that non-fiction hasn’t turned to graphic novels sooner; non-fiction often relies on visual aids to support the text, so why not use a medium that is completely visual and can seamlessly integrate text and images?

Launched in 2016 by publisher First Second (the company behind Mighty Jack, Zita the Spacegirl, and The Prince and the Dressmaker), Science Comics is a series of non-fiction graphic novels that stands as an exemplary model of what can be done with the medium.

Science Comics currently has seventeen titles, with three announced for the immediate future.

One of Science Comic’s titles is Dogs: From Predator to Protector. Set in a loose narrative of a day at the park with “his person,” Dogs is an otherwise expository work in which a terrier named Rudy is the reader’s guide through the journey of the dog, from wolves at the dawn of civilization to the pets of today.

As a graphic novel, the quality of the visuals may be just as important as the information they depict - how else would it get the attention of a prospective reader? Fortunately, the graphics of Dogs are as bold, colorful, and expressive as they are informative.

And are they ever informative! Dozens of scientific concepts are touched on along the way, from Mendelian genetics to behavior modification - concepts that most adults didn’t begin learning until junior high, if not high school. Yet these concepts are absolutely explained in ways that middle grade readers can understand, and much of that is due to how the pictures are used: readers are given constant visual examples of what the text discusses, sometimes in the form of actual diagrams, such as Punnett squares. In all honesty, this may not be the right book for those who are only casually interested in the main topic - but for those who get intense about their interests, the intense amount of information here is the perfect fit.

 

Dogs: From Predator to Protector is an information-rich resource for middle grade readers (and up!) who never stopped asking “why?” If Dogs is representative of the rest of the Science Comics series, I eagerly look forward to exploring more.