Folk tales of the runaway food type are found in Germany, the British Isles, and Eastern Europe,

as well
as the United States.[4]

In Slavic lands, a traditional character known as Kolobok (Russian: Колобок) is a ball of bread dough who
avoids being eaten by various animals (collected by Konstantin Ushinsky in Native Word (Rodnoye slovo)
in 1864). "The Pancake"[4] ("Pannekaken") was collected by Peter Asbjornsen and Jorgen Moe and
published in Norske Folkeeventyr (1842-1844), and, ten years later, the German brothers Carl and
Theodor Colshorn collected "The Big, Fat Pancake"[4] ("Vom dicken fetten Pfannekuchen") from the
Salzdahlum region and published the tale in Märchen und Sagen, no. 57, (1854). In 1894, Karl Gander
collected "The Runaway Pancake"[4] ("Der fortgelaufene Eierkuchen") from an Ögeln cottager and
peddler and published the tale in Niederlausitzer Volkssagen, vornehmlich aus dem Stadt- und
Landkreise Guben, no. 319. The Roule Galette story is a similar story from France.

A variation of this trope is found in the Hungarian tale "The Little Dumpling" ("A kis gömböc"), and
contrary to the title the main character is not a dumpling, but the Hungarian version of head cheese. In
the tale it is the gömböc that eats the others; it first consumes the family that "made" it, and then,
rolling on the road, it eats various others – including a whole army – the last of whom is a swineherd. His
knife opens the gömböc from the inside, and the people run home. In another variation the gömböc
bursts after eating too many people. A similar Russian tale is called "The Clay Guy" (Глиняный парень).
In it, an old childless couple make themselves a clay child, who first eats all their food, then them, then a
number of people, until he meets a goat who offers to jump right into his mouth, but instead uses the
opportunity to ram the clay guy, shattering him and freeing everyone. The Czech folk tale Otesánek (and
the 2000 movie with the same name) follows a similar plot.

Joseph Jacobs published "Johnny-Cake" in his English Fairy Tales (1890), basing his tale on a version
found in the American Journal of Folk-Lore.[1] Jacobs' johnny-cake rolls rather than runs, and the fox
tricks him by pretending to be deaf and unable to hear his taunting verse. In "The Wee Bannock" from
More English Fairy Tales (1894), Jacobs records a Scottish tale with a bannock as hero.[5]