Children’s picture book about throwaway culture and the pursuit of beauty
This was one of the very first cloth books given to my baby and it is such a popular and well-known book that we ended up with several versions. As flagged in my ten year anniversary post, I will be reviewing a lot more children’s books on here (as I am now reading a lot more of them!). Hopefully I can make these reviews fun and engaging for adults as well as kids. Also, because some of these books are only a few pages long, you can reasonably expect some spoilers.
“The Very Hungry Caterpillar” by Eric Carle is a children’s picture book about a tiny caterpillar who eats an array of different foods before turning into a butterfly.
At heart, this is a treatise on the benefits of consumerism, with the environmental expense justified by the attainment of physical beauty. The book omits any explanation for how the caterpillar has come into possession of so many individual pieces of fruit, glossing over wealth inequality as much as it does waste. The caterpillar’s only point of regret is when, after binge-eating, it gets a stomach ache which it resolves by temporarily dipping his feet into the wellness industry. The book is also an enormous real-world franchise, as demonstrated by how many copies, spin-offs and formats I have managed to acquire!
However questionable the messaging may be, this is a fun and engaging book that children really enjoy. The illustrations are colourful and quirky, and the board book version, with holes in each piece of eaten fruit, is especially fun for children to touch. The different sized pages depending on how many pieces of fruit there are are also very easy to turn. The array of different types of food is great for promoting language skills, and the different numbers of fruit helps to develop numerancy.
A neoliberal nightmare, sure, but it is very clear why this book became a bestselling classic.
