He’s COMING! November 16th Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone will finally hit theaters and children everywhere will rejoice! The film, an adaptation of the blockbuster book by J K Rowling, has been awaited breathlessly by children everywhere. Rowling became something of an overnight legend with the publication of the first book, part of a planned seven-volume series, of which four are completed. Children everywhere gobble Harry Potter books down like candy; adults enjoy them just as much. So what could possibly be bad about Harry? Isn’t everyone just wild about Harry?

Mixed emotions might be more appropriate from those in the size acceptance movement. The books have been enthusiastically lauded as encouragement for even the finickiest of readers to pick up a novel, targeting the difficult 9-to10 year old range with the first in the series. Rowlings books do this, grabbing young readers at a stage in their development when they are moving from more simple literature, and keeping many readers who would become problem students later in their development, those with attention disorders, reading disabilities, and poor attention spans. They appeal to boys and girls alike. They’re fun. They’re funny. They’re scary. They’re different. There is a certain casual brilliance to the way Rowling has crafted the novels to address developmental issues pertinent to each age as she wrote each successive sequel. The beauty of this plan-- to take children on a journey from age 9 to young adulthood along with Harry as he grows-- is that it keeps even the most reluctant readers coming back to at least one piece of decent literature with complex themes and issues every year. Lines form around the block with each publication, and the faithful are known to re-read all the previous installments to “get in the mood.”

So what could be bad about Harry? Unfortunately like many very good novels it reflects the prejudice of its time. Twain’s Huckleberry Finn will always be read with a jaundiced eye as revisionists uncovered its subtle racism. Dickens’ has come under fire for anti-semitism. Hemmingway is criticized as a misogynist. Whether or not these criticisms are valid, there are certainly many works that have gone on to become classics while containing prejudice. Rowling will likely fare no worse.

Rowling’s Harry Potter is in many ways a typical English orphan protagonist, and like the Oliver Twists and Jane Eyres before him he lives with horrible people. Harry is a wizard, and lives with a horrible non-wizard family (his aunt, uncle, and cousin), the Dursleys. The disturbing undercurrent in Rowlings lovely novels is that fat is bad. Harry’s uncle and cousin Dudley are painted in very stereotypical colors: fat, mean, lazy, selfish, greedy, and lacking self control. This is a concern, but one might give Ms. Rowling a bit of rein, after all the genre is fantasy. The truly alarming message is more subtle, and emerges more powerfully with each successive book in the series.

Rowling writes about food constantly in her novels. In reviewing the first book alone more than a third of the pages had references to eating, drinking, food, or characters named after food. Dudley, Harry’s non-wizard-nemesis, is associated with food negatively throughout the first section of Sorcerer’s Stone. Certainly bad people can come in all sizes, and Harry’s wizard-foe, Draco Malfoy, who will appear later in the novel, is characterized as slender. However, Rowling’s constant references to food become somewhat tangled in her her portrayal of Dudley as a horrible person. She makes frequent references to his weight, his gluttony, and his greed throughout her series. By book four, The Goblet of Fire, Dudley is so huge he is on a restricted diet and tormented by the lack of food.

The great danger is in Harry’s apparent immunity to the same nutritional laws. Harry eats constantly throughout all four novels. He uses his money, the first real money he has ever had of his own, to purchase sweets and eat until he is almost sick on numerous occasions. In later books he hoards multiple birthday cakes beneath the floorboards of his room, gouging himself on them while Dudley eats half a grapefruit in misery. Yet Dudley gets steadily bigger, meaner, and nastier while Harry remains very thin and grows more heroic with each passing sequel.

The problem here is that children in their formative years process a dangerous message: fat is bad, and it has nothing to do with food; sweets are good and pigging out is good, and you can stay skinny no matter what you eat if you are good, too. Just as the books are marvelous teaching tools for children at an important developmental stage, they harbor hidden landmines in the development of their body image attitudes, which will stay with them throughout their lives. If Dudley is fat, bad, mean, and gross no matter what he eats; if Harry is good, brave, kind, and smart no matter what he eats, the message is quite problematic. And in an era when children are developing eating disorders at younger and younger ages, such messages confusing the relationship of diet, nutrition, exercise, and body type are harmful.

Overall the books are quite good. It would be unfair to dismiss them completely because of this one subtext. In fact, Rowling includes characters of many cultural backgrounds in positive lights, and includes a great deal about tolerance. She simply misses size tolerance in the process. Psychoanalytic critics might say Ms. Rowling probably had eating or hunger issues as a child. Others might say that she read Oliver Twist too often, and never got over that “more please” scene that broke so many of our hearts when we read Dickens’ great classic. Whatever the case, it would be in the best interest of this successful and powerful writer to make a change in coming novels. She has the attention of children around the world. It would be in their best interest and her own if Harry were to learn that goodness and bravery come in all sizes, and that poor eating habits catch up with even the brightest and best young heroes.