Breaking Bread in Harry Potter The Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling define eating and drinking as a period of safety and celebration. The Hogwarts feasts show students coming together to build bonds unique to children’s literature. After Harry, discovers that he is a wizard he goes to a magical school known as Hogwarts. The use of food imagery amongst the text is symbolic of the adventures Harry, and his friends have (Broemel, 39-40). As established to share food with someone symbolizes an inclusion to a group (Humphrey et al. 1988), resulting in the sharing of food as important to social bonding. Culinary social bonding is prevalent within the wizarding world of Harry Potter (Broemel, 71). As food plays a central theme, the books emphasize intricate feasts and desserts. The food is generally composed of standard British food. But yet, incredible food items also are available to the characters. They are just not usually found …show more content…
When Harry, Ron, and Hermione attend Nearly Headless Nick’s Death Day party. The food served is a grotesque parody of the feast occurring in the great hall. Large, rotten fish laid on handsome silver platters. Cakes, burned charcoal-black, heaped on salvers. There was a great maggoty haggis. A slab of cheese covered in furry green mould. In pride of place, an enormous gray cake in the shape of a tombstone (COS, 133). As Harry, Ron, and Hermione look on in amazement a ghost walks through the putrid food with a gaping mouth. In an act that laments the loss of the simplest of activities: eating, and its connection to life. Shocked, Harry asks whether the ghost can taste the food by walking through it. The ghost responds, ‘‘almost,’’ sadly as he ‘‘drift[s] away’’ (COS, 133). Rowling builds upon the grotesque metaphor of abundance/fertility (life) with feasting, with an overtone of a physical body and its basic