food

When I was in kindergarten I was introduced to those weird, uniformly shaped potato chips known as Pringles. "Don't eat those," my dad warned me. "They'll make your hair fall out."

"Really?" I said. My dad often told me things that weren't true. But this time there was irrefutable evidence.

He rubbed a hand over his shiny bald head. "Well, look at me."

Also, I harbored the belief (until fairly recently) that botulism was *caused* by dented cans, and that if I dented a can, the food preserved within would be seething with botulism in no time.

if i ate the crusts my hair would go curly

I used to think that if you swallowed an orange or an apple seed the tree would grow in your stomach.
This concerned me greatly when I accidentally swallowed some one day.
My mother set me straight on stomach acid and soil!

My brother convinced me that brown cows gave chocolate milk

I thought people resembled food. A woman who had blonde hair with roots showing was a yellow tootsie pop. I knew a guy who looked like a hot dog popping out of a bun. There was a family that all had flushed faces and high forheads and I thought they all looked like hams.

I used to believe that if I swallowed a watermelon seed accidentally, it would grow in my tummy and come out of my eyes, ears and nose!

When I was about eight, my nine year old sister and I were sent to the store to buy some baloney for sandwiches. We returned after an hour's round trip walk, empty-handed, to tell our mom we could find balogna which looked like baloney but was spelled wrong.

When my daughter was very young, (3 or 4 years old), she overheard her Father and I talking about a friend of ours and I said, "Well, you know, he doesn't drink!" My daughter wondered for many years after, how this person could live without ever drinking!

When I was a child, I used to chew a lot of gum. When my mother would
tell me to get rid of it, I would swallow it. That upset her very much so she
told me that if I kept swallowing my gum, it would all end up in my
appendix and it would eventually explode. (Which it did, but obviously not
from the gum - I think.)

I used to believe that chewing gum was made from horses' hooves and if you swallowed it, it would wind around your heart. My mothr told me this

Before my father began to eat, he routinely sprinkled salt over everything on his dinner plate. For years I thought salt cooled hot food to an edible temperature.

My stepdaughter believed until she was
in her teens that chocolate milk came from brown cows.

In the late 1970s, the chocolate/hazelnut candy "Toffifay" had an advertisement that claimed it was "too good for kids." I thought that meant it was *illegal* for kids to buy it, and I didn't get up the courage until I was 18 - a legal adult!

I used to believe that the stuffed green olives happened in this way: At the canning warehouse, women stood at their tables opposite of the red pimento. The green olives were lined up in front of the workers who coaxed with bended finger, "Come one, little pimento, crawl into this lovely olive!" whereby the obedient pimento snuggled right inside the olive and was promptly gathered into jars for packing. lol

I believed that if someone burped, sneezed or coughed near me while I was eating, the germs would float to my food. I would frantically cover or fan my hands above any "sticky" food, like spaghetti or meatloaf, cause the germs would get stuck to it as they floated by. But if it was something dry, like bread, I could just brush the germs off the top.

Living in Louisiana, we celebrate Mardi Gras with a King Cake that has a small plastic baby figure placed inside. When I was 8 months pregnant with my third child, I offered a piece of king cake to my two young children. I was explaining to them that the cake had a baby inside of it. Both of them looked confused and refused their piece of cake. Later I realized that there had been lots of discussion about a baby being inside of me, and they were probably thinking the same thing about the cake!