The ‘Toad in the Hole’: Food and Foodways in Sue Townsend’s ‘Adrian Mole’ YA Saga

Adrian Mole is the protagonist of a book series by Sue Townsend that holds a peculiar place within young adult’s literature. The first three novels, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ (1982), The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole (1984), and The True Confessions of Adrian Albert Mole (1989) introduce readers to the everyday difficulties, the ambitions and expectations of a teenager living in the Midlands in the 1980s. The readers grow up with the eponymous hero, and a central feature of the Adrian Mole series is the ubiquitous presence of food. Food and eating rituals are the object of constant memorialization in Adrian’s diaries, and in this article I suggest that his recollections raise a number of psychological, affective, and social issues. When one reads Townsend’s multiple references to food and eating habits as signifying units of a complex socio-cultural system, as Roland Barthes and Mary Douglas argued, Adrian’s diaries bear witness to the transformations that British society underwent throughout the 1980s. More specifically, I argue that Townsend’s interest in food and foodways testifies to the crisis of traditional gender roles and the nuclear family between the 1970s and the 1980s, but also to the advent of mass-market consumer goods, as well as to effect of Thatcher’s neoliberal politics on children’s and teenagers’ nutrition.