food: general

When I was young (I don't say "when I was a child," for the belief persisted until age 18), I believed that cauliflower was the same vegetable as broccoli, only it had been picked before it "turned green" (just as immature pumpkins are green, then turn orange upon ripening). When disabused of this notion -- in an embarrassing incident during freshman year (college) dining hall -- I realized that my parents had misled me in order to get me to eat my cauliflower, by associating it with a vegetable I already enjoyed.

When I was quite young my parents and grandparents would go mushroom hunting every spring. I always thought it was strange that my mother and grandmother only went mushroom hunting and not rabit or feasant hunting like my father an grandfather. I could not imagine my mother or grandmother shooting at anything. I thought it some sort of small animal you hunted and then later ate for dinner.

A friend of mine thought that some olives grew with red edible pits (pimentos).

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.

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.

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 thought the blue veins in some cheeses were actually blood vessesls!

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!

Until I was 13, I didn't know that the meat I ate consisted of muscles. I thought that bodies contained muscles, lungs, all the usual internal organs - PLUS meat, which was sort of a filler material.

When my brother and I were little, we believed that lemons were sweet because any time we had something with lemons in it, it was sweet. We believed that until our Dad brought home a lemon and gave us a slice. I took one bite and accused him of injecting soap into it!

I never knew that raisins were dried grapes. One day I accidently dropped a grape and it rolled under our microwave. A few months later my parents changed the kitchen around and I wondered why there was a raisin where I'd left a grape.

I believed that since vegetables came from the ground it was my duty to wash them, so I put them in with my mums washing. She only knew when she heard them banging around!

Aged about six or seven, I was sat eating breakfast with my father and grandfather and asked them what "Daddies" brown sauce was made of. "It's made of daddies", they told me. I was horrified and was convinced for years that some day the sauce people would come and make my Dad into sauce.

I used to think that hotdogs came from charcoal cubes. I think it started when I watched my father set up a barbeque. I never saw the hotdogs placed on the grill. All I remember is seeing the dogs on the grill and the charcoals disintegrated...

When I was a child, my Mom told me that carrots had vitamins in them. I tried and tried to see them and was sure if I kept eating them that one day I would find a vitamin tablet inside.