As a small child who empathised with everything around me (I thought everything had feelings!) I was terribly reluctant to eat a gingerbread man. I expressed my anxiety to my mother, who told me that my stomach would put it back together once I was done eating it.
For many years after, I was convinced that the purpose of the stomach was to reassemble chewed up food. I had a clear mental image of apples, carrots, etc, sitting whole in my belly.
It was quite a few years before it dawned on me that this was ridiculous. My mother still denies telling me such a thing.
A childhood belief about eating
others believed things like this
- My dad always told me never to swallow the pips from apples because trees would start growing in my stomach!!— ALISON W
- I always believed as a child your stomach was a big hand which squeezed your food out through your bum....— amc
- I used to believe that if you ate the pips in apples a tree would grow inside your stomach.— QueenB
- Once my mother told me that if i ate 2 apples in a day, i would automatically get diahrreah!Anon
- my mom told my sister and I that if you swallow gum, it won't leave ur stomach for 7 years.— Victoria
- My mother convinced all of us kids in our family that the large rhubarb in the garden was a Man-Eating Plant. — H.Miller