Leave the great indoorsnotes on the journey

Earlier this week I started the bed-time routine of reading to our 3-month old daughter.  It is an important occasion for a father, so I wanted to select a book that reflected that gravitas of the moment.  After proper research, I decided to go with a book hailed as “one of the best children’s books ever written.”  And having sold 30 million copies worldwide since its release in 1969, I figured that The Very Hungry Caterpillar was a worthy place to start my daughter’s reading journey.

Now, I had never read this book, so I was as enthralled as she was right from the start.  I mean, this is solid story-telling.  Clocking in at only 225 words, the book manages to introduce its main character, help you identify with him, take him through an enormous crisis, and resolve it beautifully into a happy ending.  I don’t want to spoil the ending, but let’s just say our hero has quite the journey in the space of one week.

I think my daughter liked the pictures and forget about it as soon as we were done, but the story stuck with me for a long time.  As I was lying awake thinking about it, several questions started to materialize in my mind, and I might go crazy unless I get them out.  So here goes — Part 1 of what will hopefully be an ongoing series about children’s books.  First, let’s look at the storyline.

The logic and science of The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Ok, so we have a caterpillar as our main character, and he is hungry.  Nothing wrong with that.  The book doesn’t tell us what he’s been eating up to that point, but we know that caterpillars are mostly phytophagous in food habit — meaning they’re herbivores and therefore eat plants.  So his diet over the first few days of the story raises some warning flags that, frankly, his friends should have picked up on.  Apples, pears, plums, strawberries — all good, and certainly a healthy diet, but those are fruit, not plants.  This dude’s got some serious issues.

But then things get nasty.  On Friday he eats five whole oranges?  Hold up there, fellow.  Have you seen how small you are?  At their biggest, caterpillars can get up to three inches long.  You stuff five oranges into such a small body and things are going to get weird pretty quickly. I guess it’s possible though, considering that caterpillars have been called “eating machines”, and eat pretty much all the time.  According to Wikipedia:

Most species shed their skin four or five times as their bodies grow, and they eventually pupate into an adult form.  Caterpillars grow very quickly – for example, a tobacco hornworm will increase its weight ten-thousand-fold in less than twenty days. An adaptation that enables them to eat so much is a mechanism in a specialized midgut that quickly transports ions to the lumen (midgut cavity), to keep the potassium level higher in the midgut cavity than in the blood.

So let’s say our friend survives the ordeal of the five oranges.  On Saturday, however, everything falls apart in the little guy’s world.  He eats chocolate cake, ice cream, a pickle, swiss cheese, salami, a lollipop, a cherry pie, a single sausage, a cupcake and a whole slice of watermelon.  Yes, some species of caterpillar have been known to be predators and even show cannibalistic tendencies, but this is just ridiculous.  There’s no way he could survive this binge.  Something must have set him off — but I guess that is the mystery of the story?

Whatever intervention happened between Saturday and Sunday, it must have worked.  Our friend the caterpillar goes on a serious diet and eats one single leaf — which is what he should have done in the first place — and this cures him of the gigantic stomachache he must have had from the previous week.  It is highly unlikely that (1) a single leaf could cure the caterpillar of his problems, and (2) that he would only eat one leaf that day.  I don’t think they lack the mental fortitude to stop eating.

But, let’s leave it at that.  Eventually the caterpillar turns into a butterfly, and the story has a happy ending.  Despite its science being very confusing, I must say that as a science fiction novel, this story really connected with me in the end when everything finally worked out.  So what can we learn from The Very Hungry Caterpillar?

The moral of the story is…

I think this story teaches us several life lessons:

• Don’t try to be someone you’re not.  The caterpillar clearly wasn’t happy with who he was — a herbivore.  He had to go out and experiment with all kinds of different foods, and in the end it nearly killed him.  He should have just been himself.
• You need friends who care about you.  Where was the caterpillar’s friends?  Was no one there to hold him accountable when he went off the deep end?  He needed a mentor, someone to share his troubles with.
• Overindulging is never an answer.  This story doesn’t have a lot of words in it, but it goes out of its way to explain that the caterpillar had a very bad stomachache after he snapped.  This is a universal truth — if you try to drown your sorrows by overindulging in things that help you escape reality, your tummy will most certainly ache the next morning, and your troubles will still be there.
• When things go wrong, return to what you know.  After hitting rock bottom on Saturday night, the caterpillar woke up on Sunday and realized that he needs to stop running away from himself.  He went back to his roots, ate a leaf, and became a butterfly.  That’s something all of us should remember when times are tough.  Take comfort in what you know, and have hope that maybe one day we’ll all transform into butterflies.

So even though I think we can learn a lot from this story, the science still bothers me.  I’d appreciate it if any of you can shed some light on what affliction might have befallen our caterpillar.

This post is part of the Fatherhood Friday series on Dad-Blogs.  Head over there to read some of the other Fatherhood Friday posts!