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?