Cooking up change: Food and/as political resistance in children’s picturebooks

Food can be understood as a communicative system through which cultures encode values, identities, and social relations. Food Studies has shown that food production, circulation, and consumption are structured by power relations and are therefore deeply political. From this perspective, food also participates in the formation of cultural images, memories, and archives. Drawing on this premise, this article explores the notion of textu(r)alities by investigating how the material texture of food becomes a catalyst for politically charged meanings in children’s picturebooks. More specifically, the article investigates how the physical, material, and sensory experience of cooking and baking pies is woven into a textual representation of civil rights activism. Focusing on Pies from Nowhere (2018) and Sweet Justice (2022), two picturebooks dedicated to the story of Georgia Gilmore, the article adopts a Social Semiotic and Multimodal Discourse Analysis framework to argue not that picturebooks directly mobilise political action, but that the interplay of verbal and visual modes can render the material texture of food meaningful, thus prompting early forms of civic reflection on injustice, solidarity, and collective care. In this sense, food representation mediates access to a Black cultural archive and moors bodies to specific historical moments through textured social meanings.