War and Peas

Nearly forty years after its original appearance, it is shameful that Foreman’s innovative classic about co-operation between nations remains as pertinent to international relationships as then. He pictures a famine-struck country, the inhabitants, led by a lion king, thin, pale and almost transparent.

However their pleas to the neighbouring country, a land whose landforms are made of gross, oversize cakes, bread and sweets, inhabited by overfed, irascible but ultimately ineffective humans, are met with hostility and invasion.

Fortunately the invaders’ tanks plough up the barren land, they spill some of their supplies, and the birds are able to steal and sow seeds, so that the lion and his subjects are able to eat again, regaining colour, form and substance.