Eric Carle’s book “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” is a timeless classic, but his own connections with food and cooking extend far beyond that. A new exhibition at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst celebrates Carle’s longtime love of food and the ways in which food helps create community.
“Cooking with Eric Carle,” which opened on Saturday, Sept. 20, runs through Sunday, Aug. 23, 2026, and features more than 50 works created between 1965 and 2019.
Carle once told a young fan that if he were not an illustrator, he’d want to be a chef, and his love of food pervaded many of his works.
“For Eric, food and cooking was really a way of connecting with people and connecting with memories and bringing joy,” said Associate Curator Isabel Ruiz Cano. “All of his favorite foods, except for sushi, are directly related to his childhood in Germany and growing up there, which he said wasn’t the best of times, but I think that he hangs onto the moments that gave him joy, whether it was gathering eggs from his grandmother’s garden coop or eating honey straight out of the jar. He seemed to hang onto that and want to transmit that same sensation and that same joy to other people through his books.”
The exhibition is organized into three section. The first section, “Making Meals, Sharing Stories,” is about some of those food-centric works, including his 1965 illustrations for a folk recipe cookbook, “Red Flannel Hash and Shoo-Fly Pie,” as well as art from his books “Pancakes, Pancakes!” (about the process of making pancakes), “Walter the Baker” (a fictional tale, inspired by Carle’s uncle Walter, about how pretzels were invented), and, of course, “The Very Hungry Caterpillar.”
“If you know the philosophy behind cooking and how you have to always be thinking on your toes and thinking quickly and grabbing whatever you have, as you make a meal, I feel like that really also translates towards art-making,” Ruiz Cano said. “There are some things that you have to really think through and premeditate, like [baking], but there are things that are just happenstance in the way that you create.”
The middle section of the exhibition, “Playing with Your Food,” features works that show Carle’s sense of whimsy in a food context, including, among others, an illustration in which larks fly around a bagel and another in which an otter eats a slice of cake while it swims. In another piece, likely a draft of a commissioned piece for the American Library Association, a fox eats a book below the text “Books are good for you.” In a nearby photo, Carle himself poses in a professional kitchen in Japan, “cooking” a copy of “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” and some of his iconic painted tissue papers in a pot.
“He has such a good sense of humor about things,” Ruiz Cano said. “He knew he was the Caterpillar King, and he used that to his advantage, and he really owned that and spread joy with it wherever he could.”
The exhibition’s third and final section, “Oodles of Doodles,” is about Carle’s love of doodling, as its name suggests, and its largest work is a collection of facsimiles of guest checks from Sienna, a now-closed restaurant in South Deerfield. Carle was a regular guest there, and he liked doodling creatures – crocodiles, roosters, dragons, etc. – on his checks.
The exhibition closes with an unusual piece: a collection of four painted yogurt lids arranged in a small grid. Carle ate yogurt every day when he worked in his studio. In 2002, there was a moment during the museum’s busy opening in which Carle disappeared to an empty room alone to eat yogurt.
“He said he wanted a moment of peace and quiet during all of this hustle and bustle of opening a museum, but I think that really just captures how humble he was about himself,” Ruiz Cano said. “He didn’t mean for this museum to be a shrine for him; he really meant it to be a home for artists and illustrators from all over the world and all over the United States, and I think that’s what we hope to be.”
The exhibition also features a “dining room table” with interactive activities for kids, including tangle toys with which guests can make a “meal,” cards to share recipes on, and conversation cards.
“Both art and food are very comforting for people, and, in a museum context, we present art to bring our community together and to really be that community space, the same way that a restaurant ends up being,” Ruiz Cano said.
The Eric Carle Museum is open Wednesday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday from 12 to 5 p.m. Admission is $15 for adults; $10 for students, teachers, seniors (ages 65 and up), and youth (ages 1 to 18); and free for members. For more information and announcements about upcoming programming, visit carlemuseum.org.
