In England, 'Lyons Syrup' comes in tins with a picture of a lion lying in the sun. My father told me that this was how they made syrup, by leaving lions out in the sun to melt. I believed it for a long time, and even thought I could taste the lion.
food
5,406 beliefs in this area
When I was a kid, my sister told me that
the ends of bananas were poisonous. I've
since realized that it's not true, but
I still never finish bananas, I always
eat right to the end, then throw it away.
I used to believe…
1) that jingle from the ice-cream van means they've run out.
2) I have a pudding stomach (I convinced my kids of this) because even when I'm full up and I can't eat anymore main course, I can always eat a pudding.
3) based in how it is when it melts, my step daughter told the waitress that the sorbet she was eating was 'slug spit'.
pick of the bunch
I used to belive that if I ate orange peel it would expand in my stomach and blow me up.
When I was about 6 I remember our whole family going to the house of friends of the family. My older brother was drinking this black liquid with his friend. I wanted to try some. They told me that it was a drink called Aloc Acoc and that is was poisonous to me. Of course I was mystified by how they could drink it and looked up to them both....until I discovered the empty Coca Cola bottle......I was a simple child!
When eating boiled eggs with my father,
he used to say that eating egg shell was
good for you as the egg shell used to
"cut the cords", my father believed this explanation was more than enough, and I never did find out what "the cords" were !
I was abut 8 when my Dad was teaching me how to crack and eat walnuts - he told me that you shouldn't eat the membrane bits in between an you should make sure that they get thrown away - I asked him why, and he told me that they were poisonous - I believed this until I was 18 and I still eat walnuts with some trepidation
We used to get a famous brand of butter with picture of a cow on the front, and i used to think the butter was actually made of cows, and would askfor "cow butter" on my sandwiches
When I was a kid I read that salt was made from a combination of sodium and cloride. I later discovered that both salt and chloride were actually poisonous (that's what the book said anyway). It didn't take me long to conclude (despite all evidence to the contrary) that salt was completely deadly to eat and so i refused to eat anything that had been anywhere near the stuff. I must have spent ages trying to figure out why people didn't keep dropping down dead around the dinner table - A death I imagined to be particullarly disgusting and gruesome... I mean look what it does to slugs.
i believed, coming from my grandfather on my mother's side, that veal was not to be eaten because it was mermaid meat. i learned that this wasn't true, of course, but i was shocked to learn, at 15 yrs old, that my grandfather believed this with all his heart... even to the day he died.
when I was around 4, my parents scared me half to death when they told me that the pips that I ate will grow in my stomach. I couldn't imagine that my stomach could grow to the size of a watermelon!
pick of the bunch
My dad told me that if I ate my crusts it'd put hairs on my chest. As I am female I didn't want a hairy chest, so I never ate the crusts
When my son was 7 or 8, he use to love turkey but hate chicken. No way could I make him eat it until one day I told him that the roasted chicken I had cooked was a "baby turkey". Boy, did love it. Never had any trouble with him eating chicken (baby turkey) after that.
When I went to nursery school we got to drink milk or water at certain times of day. I used to think that if you mixed them together, and drank it, you would turn into a dinosaur. I have no idea why...
My uncle told me and my sister that when you break Crunchie bars the bits that fly out were champagne. I use to spend all my pocket money trying to recreate this and failing. I'm sure he had Cadbury shares.
When I was younger, there were protests against destruction of the rainforests for cattle ranching. So somebody told me that 'they cut down the rainforests to make McDonalds beefburgers'. For years I thought that burgers were made of wood.
My aunt used to fry eggplant, It was her favorite vegetable. She told me that they were chicken nuggets. She told me what they really were, and I never ate my aunt's supposed chicken nuggets again.
One time we went to a restaurant, and my dad took my sister (who was about 4) to see the lobster tank. She asked him how the restaurant could tell the girl lobsters from the boy lobsters. THinking fast, my dad said that the boy lobsters had blue rubber bands and the girl lobsters had pink ones.
She announced this to her class at school the next day. And she believe it well until she got into high school.
until i was about 11, i used to think that the 'quiche' i saw advertised on my school dinners' board, was a mysterious nasty-sounding food, pronounced 'kwichy'. mmmmmm.
when i was a kid, i used to believe that 'polos' (a british mint sweet with a hole through the middle) used to give you special super-powers when you ate them (i was a green-eyed fan of christopher reeve's superman at the time, i think). as a result, me and my friend used to sit in the garden, munch a load, and then beat each others brains out for a few hours each weekend. maybe my parents should've replaced them with ritalin.