There's a Scottish children's game-song "Jenny Jo" (first written down about 1700) in the form of a dialogue between a mother and child in which the mother tells the child to wait until the grain has been grown, harvested, milled and baked into bread before she can eat - and she dies of hunger before it's ready. The same idea is used in the song "Earthly Life" fom Mahler's "Des Knaben Wunderhorn", so it must have been in German folklore too.