Three-course dinner chewing gum.Fizzy lifting drinks.Everlasting gobstoppers.These, of course, are the creations of Willy Wonka, who himself is the creation of author Roald Dahl.Food is a huge part of Dahl's work, not only in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory but also in Matilda, James and the Giant Peach, The BFG, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and more. And as it turns out, Dahl's creative and sometimes twisted approach to food wasn't confined to his books."Food was a huge part of our upbringing," says Dahl's daughter Lucy. (Roald Dahl passed away in 1990 at the age of 74.)In this week's episode of The Sporkful podcast, ahead of Father's Day, Lucy Dahl shares stories of the witch's potions that accompanied bedtime, the cabbage her father said came straight from the Queen's garden, and being woken up in the middle of the night to eat chocolate."Everything about our childhood was eccentric," she says, "although we didn't realize it at the time because it was just normal to us."Lucy Dahl is 51 now, but she still bursts with childlike glee when she recalls her father's "midnight feasts."He'd wake the kids up in the middle of the night and pile them into the car – which was full of hot chocolate and cookies – and drive them up the road in the English countryside where they lived.Then they'd walk in to the woods in their pajamas to look for badgers."You couldn't talk, and he'd say, 'Nobody move! And if you've got an itch, blow on it. Try and hold your breath, try not to breathe!' " Lucy recalls. "And sure enough, Mr. Badger would come prowling out and walk right past us. It was incredibly exciting."Only once they had seen an animal could they tuck in to their sweet feast."And then," Lucy says, "we'd all go home, back to bed, delighted."Roald Dahl kept his kids entertained during normal eating hours, too. He often used mealtime to test out new characters from stories he was working on."The Minpins lived in the woods beyond our house," Lucy remembers, referring to one of her father's last books, about a tiny people who live inside trees. "The BFG – the Big Friendly Giant – lived underneath our orchard. It all coincided with what we ate. For breakfast were Minpins' eggs and fried bread. But what they actually were were quail eggs."Just as Roald Dahl used stories to bring food to life at home, he used food to bring characters to life in his books. Willy Wonka's fizzy lifting drinks aren't just a fun idea – they also tell us something about who he is. In Fantastic Mr. Fox, the three mean farmers who are out to get Mr. Fox are described only by their body shapes and their diets:
What If Willy Wonka Was Your Dad? Roald Dahl's Magical Parenting With Food
