The power of a good story is a globally accepted joy. While cooking with children is a great way of passing on the art of nutritiously feeding the family, adding a story to the process nourishes imaginations as well.
A Vegetarian Family’s World Tour suggests traditional tales, your own imaginative stories and family anecdotes. Also included are a selection of folktales from around the world, illustrated with black and white line drawings. Here are two tasters from Germaine’s re-tellings of the Aboriginal story of Tiddalik and a West African fable involving the spider-trickster Anansi.
Tiddalik
Tiddalik is a myth from the Aboriginal Dreamtime — an Australian mythological time before people existed. It reminds us of the importance of water, both as a drink and for the growth of the food we eat.
Tiddalik was a frog. Tiddalik was the largest frog ever to have lived and one morning he woke up thirsty. Very thirsty. Tiddalik began to quench his thirst by lapping at the streams and brooks with his long-as-a-snake tongue and he didn’t stop. When the streams and brooks were drunk dry, Tiddalik moved onto the rivers. He lapped and gulped until he began to swell up with the water in his belly but still he drank. The largest frog ever to live can drink a lot of water and Tiddalik was growing bigger by the minute. He drank the rain before it could fill the streams and he drank the lakes. He even darted his long-as-a-snake tongue deep down into the wells and springs for more thirst quenching water.
Meanwhile, the other animals were becoming worried. They too were thirsty. And hungry. The fruit wasn’t swelling on the branches and the grains weren’t growing tall. They pleaded with Tiddalik to stop drinking. Surely he must be full by now — he had swelled to twice his original size — but Tiddalik still drank. The animals fussed and fretted. They anxiously asked around but no one knew what to do. No one, that is, except for Wise Old Wombat…
[Buy A Vegetarian Family's World Tour to read about Wombat's wise plan and to find out if it works!]
Anansi and Turtle Share Dinner
Anansi the spider is a popular character of West African stories. He is a trickster whose antics usually backfire on him.
It was nearing the end of another hot day and Anansi the spider had been picking, scrubbing, slicing and roasting his biggest and fattest yams all afternoon. Now he was mighty hungry. The smell of roasting yams was sweet enough to make his mouth water and his eight legs twitch with eagerness. The smell from Anansi’s oven was strong enough to reach the road where Turtle was hungrily walking his way home after a hard day’s work.
Turtle knew that the custom in Anansi’s country was to share a meal with any visitor who should arrive so he trudged up to Anansi’s door where the scent of soft, plump yams seeped around the edges and Turtle knocked his loudest knock. Rat-a-tat-tat. Anansi wasn’t best pleased. He wasn’t in the mood to share but he opened the door with a smile anyway.
‘Hello Turtle! How lovely to see you! Won’t you come in and have dinner with me?’ Anansi was thinking fast while speaking and just as Turtle set his front feet through the doorway Anansi shrieked, ‘Oh, Turtle, your feet! They are so dirty! I’m afraid you can’t come to the table with dust on them like that.’
Poor turtle had been crawling on his feet all day and indeed they were very dusty. ‘I do apologise,’ he said. ‘I’ll just go and wash them in the river before dinner.’
As Turtle trudged off to the river, Anansi served up the yams and tucked in greedily without waiting for Turtle to return. By the time Turtle knocked on the door again, rat-a-tat-tat, half the yams were in Anansi’s tummy!
‘I hope I’m not too late for your kind dinner invite,’ said Turtle, looking past Anansi to the half-eaten yams.
‘No, not at all.’ replied Anansi. ‘But Turtle! I thought you went to the river to wash. How rude of you to come back again with feet too dusty to come to the table.’
[Will poor Turtle ever be clean enough to eat with Anansi and how will Anansi get his comeuppance? Read the full story in A Vegetarian Family's World Tour to find out!]
