general

I was always told by my grandfather that eating LOTS of Dried Apricots I would grow up to be big and strong. I ate 2 packets in 2 hours and vomited all over the kitchen floor, and my poor old grandfather had to clean up the mess while my grandma had a good old laugh.

Gutz

Sense Mc Donalds was my favorite restraunt and the one I ate at most as a child, I often ordered the Chicken Nuggets. I was shocked to hear that at Burger King, they served somthing coalled Chicken Tenders. I was scared to try them because I didn't know what they were!

Derek

I used to believe that noodles that were dyed different colors such as green had been killed.

Tasha

Remeber the old Pillsbury Dough Boy commercials? When I was small, my mother called my brothers and I into the kitchen to see the Pillsbury Dough Boy jump from the canister when she wacked it on the edge of the counter (like he did in the commercials...) We stood there, dumbfounded, because he didn't appear. It wasn't until my mother began laughing hysterically that I realized she was playing a joke on us.

kelly from kansas

i thought that "aromatic" duck was actually "asthmatic" duck.
poor thing...

rachael

I used to think that if I held the cold drink in my glass above the hot food on my plate, it would effectively cool down the food.

Matt

When my sister was little she somehow got confused about the old adage that eating carrots made your eyesite better - she thought it made her eyes "shiny". We just went along with it since she was very eager to finish her carrots if it was going to do that. For awhile she would always end a meal asking one of us if her eyes looked shiny.

Whit

When I was 8 or so, I misheard my aunt ordering dumplings at a Chinese restaurant. I thought she said "Duckings."

I wouldn't eat dumplings until I was 15, when one of my friends managed to convince me that they weren't actually made from baby ducks.

jeni

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.

Edward Poole

THat Cheesecake was actually made of cheese. I was 18 when I found out it wasn't!

R

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

HA

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.

Linda now 52

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.

Anon

In his younger years, my brother would not eat the cone part of an ice cream cone because he thought they were made of wood.

Sammy

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

Helen

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.

Susie

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!

rodene

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.

Martin