Naughty Kid Food Fantasies With Andy Hearnden

The original Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971) opens with a chocolate river, lollipop bushes, and edible daffodils—a room built for pure, unapologetic gorging. Chef Andy Hearnden remembers watching that scene as a kid and being completely mesmerized. "Putting you in that place of literally picking things up and eating it was so magical," he says. What he didn't realize until revisiting it as an adult is how much the movie gets wrong about hunger—and how much that matters for how we actually experience food.

The Fantasy of Being Hungry

Hearnden grew up as what he calls "a bit of a glutton"—the kind of kid who would sneak extra butter and brown sugar onto his morning porridge, who would draw pictures of calzones before he'd ever eaten one, who would fantasize about mixing flour and cheese in a bowl and expecting it to become pizza. "I would just be like, 'What's in a pizza? I think there's flour in a pizza, so I'll put some flour in there and then cheese,' and I would just be like mix them in a bowl and then put them in the oven and expect it to come out," he recalls. This kind of food fantasy, he argues, is driven by genuine hunger—the three-o'clock-after-school hunger that makes everything taste better.