The Poetical Institute’s Peculiar Powers of Vegetables & Fruits

These super silly rhymes and poems are full of frivolity, despite trying to assert the importance of fruit and vegetables.

The overarching theme that fruit and vegetables are essential to help you grow strong and smart is repeated through 48 poems that push the theme to places no one could expect; eat fennel to be like a flamingo, honeydew melons can give you skills in hacking computers and watermelons will turn you into a werewolf, eating satsumas will arm you with the ways of a samurai and eating turnips will make you telekinetic.

All of the poems are in the same rhyming couplet form so it’s better to dip in an out of the book than attempt to read them one after another. The book is divided into seven strange categories, including enhanced humans, supernatural food-nomena, 21st-century essentials and martial artistry. 

The book is handsomely produced and the illustrations are charming, with full-colour pages as well as illustrations around the poems themselves.