The "Oz" series (1900-1920)

AUTHOR: L. Frank Baum

KEYWORDS: animals, children's fiction, fantasy, food

Alcott, Louisa May
Bellamy, Edward
Child, Lydia Maria
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins
Graham, Sylvester
Howells, William Dean
Sinclair, Upton
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Twain, Mark
Ward, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen)

L. Frank Baum's fictional world of Oz features numerous talking animals and other sentient nonhuman beings; all of Dorothy's adventures feature interactions and conflicts with other-than-human beings. She lives predominantly but not exclusively on a vegan diet, comprised of fruit, vegetables, nuts, and grains though sometimes she eats cheese and eggs. In Ozma of Oz (1907), Dorothy and Billina, the yellow hen, discuss dietary habits (32-35), and Dorothy and the Hungry Tiger discuss the ethics of eating (119-120, 134-135).

On occasion her consumption of flesh-foods is explicitly mentioned. Thus, in The Road to Oz (1909), while Dorothy emphatically remarks that “in Oz all animals [are] treated with as much consideration as the people” (166), earlier in the novel she voices her desire for “some beefsteak,” which she is eventually served “smoking hot” (87). When Dorothy and her company visit King Dox and his fox kingdom, they are “served chicken soup and roasted turkey and stewed duck and fried grouse and broiled quail and goose pie, and as the cooking was excellent the King's guests enjoyed the meal, and ate heartily of the various dishes” (54). In The Scarecrow of Oz (1915), Button-Bright enjoys “turkey-leg” (249) and Cap'n Bill asks for “some fried onions an' pickled tripe” at another occasion (142). Similar scenes are described in The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1913), Tik-Tok of Oz (1914), and The Magic of Oz (1919).

In Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (1908), the Wizard resolves to catch some fish (because the cat in their company cannot eat fruit), arguing that “[f]ishes are not animals, and they are as cold and moist as the vegetables themselves” (72). A similar sentiment about fish is voiced in Baum's final volume, Glinda of Oz (1920): “In Oz, where all the animals and birds can talk, many fishes are able to talk also, but usually they are more stupid than birds and animals, because they think slowly and haven't much to talk about” (146).

Throughout the books, Dorothy and the inhabitants of the earth's surface are referred to as "meat-people," in contradistinction to the nonhuman beings Dorothy meets during her travels, such as the bread and bun people or the Mangaboos, a vegetable people living in glass houses. In Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (1908), Dorothy and the Wizard visit the Mangaboos in their “Vegetable Kingdom” (54). The Mangaboos procreate by planting, and their people subsequently “grow on bushes” in their “folk gardens” (58). Mangaboos “must be picked" before they can “acquire their real life” and “become good citizens” (59). The Mangaboo Prince is worried that Dorothy and her friends will “ruin our pretty melon vines and berry bushes” to satisfy their hunger (65). Indeed, when the party leaves the Vegetable Kingdom after some turmoil that includes picking a new Princess from the Mangaboos' royal bush, they stop by the “vegetable gardens” to indulge in “strawberries and melons, and several other unknown but delicious fruits, of which they ate heartily” (69).

In The Emerald City of Oz (1910), Dorothy and company meet people made of buns and bread, and eventually get into trouble because one of their party starts nibbling away at some of the bread-people. Indeed, Dorothy initially decides to go to "Bunbury" – the town of the bread and bun people – because the name “sounds like something to eat,” As it turns out, the houses in Bunbury “were all made of crackers, … having balconies and porches with posts of bread-sticks and roofs shingled with wafer-crackers” (181). The inhabitants, too, are all “made of buns and bread” (182). Given the intruders, the inhabitants are rightly scared, particularly when Dorothy inquires about food:

They looked at one another undecidedly, and then one portly bun man, who seemed a person of consequence, stepped forward and said: “Little girl, to be frank with you, we are all eatables. Everything in Bunbury is eatable to ravenous human creatures like you. But it is to escape being eaten and destroyed that we have secluded ourselves in this out-of-the-way place, and there is neither right nor justice in your coming here to feed upon us” (183).

It is finally agreed upon that Dorothy may eat a “back fence” and a “wheelbarrow” that are made of “waffles” and “nabiscos with a zuzu wheel” (185), respectively, as well as a “shortcake piano” (186). A notable Bunbury family is named "Graham," quite obviously after Sylvester Graham, the inventor of Graham bread and whose name was lent to Graham crackers. At one point, Dorothy speaks to the Graham Gems, “six roguish looking brown children,” with Billina the hen wondering out loud whether their “mother could spare one or two” of them (186). Indeed, Dorothy's company ultimately cannot restrain themselves, nibbling away at some of the inhabitants, and they have to leave Bunbury under the threat of being baked themselves in the town's “great ovens” (191).

In The Lost Princess of Oz (1917), the moral and ethical complexities of human diet give rise to the conviction, expressed by the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow, that nonhuman beings are better off and in many ways superior to humans:

“You and I, friend Scarecrow, are much more easily cared for than those clumsy meat people, who spend half their time dressing in fine clothes and who must live in splendid dwellings in order to be contented and happy. You and I do not eat, and so we are spared the dreadful bother of getting three meals a day. Nor do we waste half our lives in sleep, a condition that causes the meat people to lose all consciousness and become as thoughtless and helpless as logs of wood.”

“You speak truly,” responded the Scarecrow, tucking some wisps of straw into his breast with his padded fingers. “I often feel sorry for the meat people, many of whom are my friends. Even the beasts are happier than they, for they require less to make them content. And the birds are the luckiest creatures of all, for they can fly swiftly where they will and find a home at any place they care to perch; their food consists of seeds and grains they gather from the fields and their drink is a sip of water from some running brook. If I could not be a Scarecrow – or a Tin Woodman – my next choice would be to live as a bird does” (308-309).