Lunch from Home / Comida de Casa. By Joshua David Stein. Art by Jing Li. With contributions from Niki Russ Federman, Ray Garcia, Preeti Mistry, and Mina Park. Translation by Ariela Rudy Zaltzman. Rise x Penguin Workshop. $18.99.
This book carries a lot of emotional freight: food as connection, recalled childhood experiences, multiculturalism, low-grade bullying, inclusiveness, the balance between fitting in and being oneself, family and ethnic traditions – all in a dual-language presentation that expands the reaching-out of the lessons while underlining them. That is a great deal to pack into 40 pages, eight of which are two-page wordless illustrations focusing on the everyday environments of the four diverse children on whom the book is centered. Originally published in 2022 and now available with side-by-side English and Spanish text, Lunch from Home / Comida de Casa retains a simplicity of presentation and forthright approach to learning about others’ culinary cultures that keeps the rather preachy underlying story enjoyable as well as instructive.
That story itself is at the service of its message and is therefore, understandably, thin. Kids eat lunch together at school, but four students – one per day – are shown having food that differs significantly from the sandwiches that most of their classmates bring from home. First a girl whose family is from India (a fact never stated directly) is shown bringing dhokla cake with spices; then a girl from Korea has gimbap – rice and vegetables rolled in seaweed; next, a Jewish girl is shown with a bagel layered with lox, cream cheese, capers and tomato; and then a Hispanic boy has a tortilla filled with a chopped-up hot dog plus scrambled egg and cheese. In each case, a classmate eating at the same table as a protagonist comments negatively on the differentness of the non-sandwich food, and in each case the child who brought it feels uncomfortable and tells his family just to pack a sandwich for the next day. The feeling of not fitting in is stronger, at first, than the desire to eat an enjoyable culturally determined meal.
Eventually all four “different” kids have sandwiches for lunch – and quickly realize that they do not enjoy them as much as their families’ usual fare. So they go back to bringing what they did before, and now when other kids comment on the non-sandwich foods, the girls and boy acknowledge what they have brought for lunch, explain a little about the food, and simply say that they enjoy it. And their classmates listen, absorb the lesson, and as the book says at the end, “Todos comieron juntos / And they ate their lunches together.”
Simplistic the presentation may be, but it gets the point across effectively and, thanks to a back-of-the-book biographical page about Niki Russ Federman, Ray Garcia, Preeti Mistry, and Mina Park, provides a real-world connection for the fictionalized (but not at all far from reality) story. Joshua David Stein is careful to minimize any sense of embarrassment so as to present the lesson of tolerance in as gentle a tone as possible. And Jing Li’s art is equally sensitive: she is at pains to portray the kids in the classroom with different skin tones and other elements of appearance, underlining the book’s overall message of tolerant acceptance of the “other” while also showing that exclusion (which is here very mild, but is still hurtful) can come from any peer, of any appearance. Adult involvement is noticeably absent throughout the story: except in those two-page wordless illustrations showing the kids’ out-of-school environment, grown-ups are not a factor at all here, leaving the kids to interact in their own way and ultimately solve their own problems by asserting their own sense of self and transforming the group dynamic in a small way.
Small ways, small steps, eventually lead to much bigger forms of acceptance on the life journey that the four adults whose experiences underlie this book have already undertaken – on which their four fictionalized counterparts are just embarking. That is the “meta” message here: school lunchtime involving the differentness of foods, leading to mild conflict and child-led understanding and reconciliation, provides a road map for resolving the much larger issues that kids will encounter over time as they grow and interact with many others, on many different levels. That is an even heavier weight for this slight story to bear, but it is a worthy one for it to communicate – doubly so when the tale and its lessons are simultaneously presented in two languages.
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