Food for thought

The Onion’s Great Escape
By Sara Fanilli, (Phaidon, $24.98, grade K & up)

The Onion’s Great Escape  does for the brain what its subject does for the nose and mouth — not unpleasant but provocative.

The young onion challenges the reader, first, to pull it out of the book using the perforations to lift it away, creating a hole in the spine. Then it teases the mind with questions such as, “Would you be different if you had a different name?” “How?” “What is the longest minute you can remember?” And my favorite, “Can your memory become full?”

This all somehow aids the young onion’s effort to escape being fried. It might be silly, but it’s old-fashioned interactive. There is little left of the book when someone’s done reading, but meantime, they’ve devoured a tasty, tactile, thoughtful experience, with their own (albeit cardboard) whole red onion as a reward.

A World of Food: Discover Magical Lands Made of Things You Can Eat
By Carl Warner (Abrams, $17.95, grades preK & up)

While we’re playing with our food, Carl Warner draws luscious landscapes with foods of the same color. He garnishes the images with three-stanza poems describing the scene of all the foods in that color.

The color gold, for instance, includes trees with cornflake leaves, cinnamon stick lamps, and roasted nut walls “where candles glow from cobs of corn/ On window sills of bread.” Yum.

Frank Lipsius is a contributing writer to MetroKids.