Hey, American Academy of Pediatrics: Here's The Problem With "The Very Hungry Caterpillar"

I mean, besides the art, which is, as any educated Art expert can tell you, what they refer to in technical terms as "fugly."

As parents, we all have to do things we don't want to do. Change poopy diapers, get up in the middle of the night, pick other people's boogers, realize we have nowhere to put the other people's boogers once we've successfully picked them, hide other people's boogers in our pockets, laundry.... you get the picture.

Lately, my chief responsibility as a parent has been reading the same 4 books over and over. And over. And over. Yesterday I read "Green Eggs and Ham" probably 8 times in a row. And that book is LONG.

The problem is, I'm an English major. I cannot repeatedly read ANY book without beginning to question its deeper themes, meanings, and subtexts. I just can't. This is what I was trained for.

"Really, you giant Weenie?" You may be snarking. "Even CHILDREN'S books? Lighten up, they're just kids' books!"

Yes, you uncultured swine. Even children's books. And seriously, has telling anyone to "lighten up" EVER actually worked? MAYBE YOU NEED TO DARKEN DOWN, IMAGINARY HYPOTHETICAL CRITIC!

Ahem.

Anyway.

Yes, even children's books have deeper themes and messages. Take, for example, Dr. Seuss's venerable classic, "The Lorax." The message here is not subtle: when industry operates without respect to the sustainability of its product, ultimately everyone suffers, and the industry ends. It also has a strong message of personal responsibility for the next generation to be better than the last. 

I personally like this message. I'm on board for what "The Lorax" has to say. 

Then there are books like "Orange Pear Apple Bear." This book consists of those four words in different orders with amusing illustrations.

There's not a whole lot here. Certainly no political slant. But even just this simple book encourages imagination and playing with words (like for instance how "orange" can be both a noun and an adjective, and then imagining what would happen if "pear" and "apple" were used as adjectives). Also these illustrations are what Professional Art Experts like to call "really pretty." I don't mind reading "Orange Pear Apple Bear" ad infinitum.

But there's one children's classic that I'm seriously considering axing from my library all together, and that is "The Very Hungry Caterpillar."

This is without a doubt one of the most well-known and loved children's books. It's been around since the 60s. Everyone knows this book. It's the story of a caterpillar who turns into a butterfly. The art style is not my taste, kind of a mixed-media collage thing that just looks dark and cluttered to me, but that's not the problem.

I've never liked this book, but I didn't really think about why. The caterpillar always seemed kind of lonely to me. As a kid, though, I didn't think much more about it. But recently, as I've been reading it over and over, something really started to needle me. Something familiar, and unpleasant, and haunting.

It started with the third-to-last page, where Eric Carle describes the caterpillar as "not a little caterpillar anymore, but a big fat caterpillar."

Ok, I reasoned to myself. This is correct. Caterpillars do get big and fat, and there's nothing inherently bad or insulting about these words. I have my own deep scars that make me cringe at the word "fat," and I need to monitor my tone and inflection so it doesn't come across to Poopy that I still think of "big" and "fat" as essentially insults, even when applied to a caterpillar. That's on me, though, that's my bias.

The next thing that bothered me was the caterpillar's Saturday meal. Most of those foods aren't things caterpillars actually eat. It's not very accurate.

Then it started to bother me that the book is linking eating getting bigger and fatter. This isn't really something I want to emphasize to my daughter yet. It's a child's job to grow. Again, the book isn't saying anything inherently negative about it-- after all, the caterpillar HAS to grow, to become a butterfly.

Yet somehow, it still bothered me.

Then, today, it hit me.

The caterpillar eats a small amount of fruit every day. Then, one day, he goes totally nuts and gorges on ridiculous amounts of food. The next day, all he eats are a few bites of leaf, "and he felt much better." Then he goes into his cocoon for two weeks, eats nothing at all, and THEN becomes a beautiful butterfly.

Of course this book doesn't sit right with me. It's pretty much my exact eating disorder, illustrated with a caterpillar.

I struggled for years with yo-yo dieting, always escalating, culminating in the summer after I graduated college. I had been experimenting with 2 and 3-day fasts, preparing for the summer when I attempted to go 30 days consuming nothing but water. I made it 9 days before the dizziness, exhaustion, nausea, and general I'm-about-to-die feeling overwhelmed me. I had a vision of the beautiful butterfly I would be, but ultimately, I didn't have the suicidal determination necessary to stay in my cocoon. I remained a fat caterpillar.

Obviously, Eric Carle could never have foreseen my individual brand of crazy when he wrote the book. I don't think there was ever any intention of creating a how-to manual for a binging/purging cycle. But nonetheless, that is what the book depicts. And even conceding that starvation dieting is not what this book is teaching, what is the book supposed to be teaching? Counting? The days of the week? It's certainly not the life cycle and eating habits of caterpillars, because ... it's wrong.

Clearly, though, some people do think that the book is supposed to be teaching healthy eating, because it has actually been used by the American Academy of Pediatrics, as part of their war on childhood obesity. I think we can all agree that the eating in this book, while cutesy and pattern-following and perhaps entertaining to children, is far from healthy. 

Even disregarding the Saturday binge and the two-week starvation diet, this book sets no good principles for healthy eating. Children don't grow strong and healthy on a diet of only fruits and leaves. They aren't bugs. Worse, the book states that every day, no matter how much fruit the caterpillar eats, he's always hungry (which I imagine you would be, if all you ate was fruit). Is this what the AAP recommends we teach children? To go to bed hungry every night, disregarding your body's hunger cues, until you run out of willpower and binge on ice cream, pickles, and salami? That the only two states of being are "hungry" and "painfully overstuffed"? Exactly what part of that teaches healthy habits? 

Maybe the problem is that we're trying to conduct a war on obesity, instead of a war on unhealthy eating. Obesity can actually be solved with eating disorders. You can have a nation of people eating very unhealthily, suffering major nutritional deficits, with a completely disordered relationship to food, and have no obese people, and say, "We won!" without increasing national health or raising life expectations. Instead of seeing fat as the enemy, wouldn't it be better, kinder, and ultimately just smarter, to treat disordered eating and prevent the kind of fear-based shaming that leads to restricting and binging in the first place? Instead of encouraging kids by saying, "It's ok, someday you'll become a beautiful butterfly," wouldn't it be more truthful, more accepting, and more kind, to say, "You're an absolutely fabulous caterpillar?"

I may just be an overly sensitive plus-size Momma with too many pregnancy hormones and a hefty Liberal bias. But I'm throwing my copy of "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" out. I'll see if I can find something to replace it like "The Comfortably Satiated Lemur," or maybe "The Chicken Who Ate Balanced Meals Every Day and Stayed a Chicken."