However, even as a child I loved stories like The Land of Cockaigne, where, as mentioned above, food grew on trees, the walls of the houses were made of gingerbread and the rivers flowed with wine and ready-to-eat seafood. I do wonder though if I would have seen the presented dystopic elements all that clearly in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs if I had read this story as a child (probably not). Now I have always enjoyed stories about food getting out of control, and the idea of an El Dorado like food utopia ending up as a dystopia really resonates with me, both tickling my funny bone and also of course making me think a bit.
There is thus a strong attitude featured in folklore that free and magical food (and that one does not have to do much in order to receive or eat it) is not only often too good to be true, but that it can easily have adverse effects if one is unable or in some cases, unwilling to control and master it. And in my humble opinion, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs actually seems to combine two European folklore traditions, the legend of the Land of Cockaigne, the so-called Schlaraffenland, a utopian land of milk and honey, where residents do not have to work and where food is not only readily available, but where fish, already cooked, swim in the rivers, and the houses are made of gingerbread and candies, and indeed the many folklore stories presenting uncontrollable cooking and food (often with magic pots that continue cooking porridge etc. While Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is of course first and foremost simply a fun romp, both Judi Barret’s narrative and Ron Barrett’s accompanying artwork also manage to convey rather vividly how food can become a rather massive problem when it is uncontrollable or uncontrolled.
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