general

When I was little, I told my younger brother (four years younger than me) than pork comes from a pig, and ham comes from a hamster. He believed me, and even got into an argument with his friend, who was convinced that they both came from a pig. If this was so, he argued, why did they have different names?

Anon

Growing up in a Chinese household, I never ate (or encountered) much cheese in my childhood.
When I got to college, I saw vats and vats of this white, creamy, curdled substance. I overheard others talking about it, and I concluded it was called "College Cheese." It wasn't until my SENIOR year in college that I realized it was "Cottage Cheese" (which still doesn't make sense to me).

Anon

I used to think that the little black bit going through the inside of a banana was a spider's leg. However, I didn't know it went through the whole banana, so when I saw a tiny little bit of that black hairy stuff, I often freaked out. I didn't know how the single spider leg got into the banana, but it had to be alive!

I still don't eat the very last bit of the banana with the spider's leg in it.

Snap-hiss

when my brother was younger i told him that sliced mushrooms (on pizza's etc) were dried slugs. my brother is now 9 and still believes me

evil older sister

Iused to believe when I was very young that peanuts had little elf's in them. You know when you split a peanut open & you have one side that has that little cone shaped end to it.....I thought it was a little elf with a beard & cap sleeping in his peanut bed. I never ate that side of the peanut. Goofy kid I was!

Silly Girl

Mom couldn't understand why at dinner time I wanted Chicken Pox.

Kristin

Because of the way honey was always drawn in books and cartoons, I used to think it looked and tasted like that cheese stuff you dip nacho chips in. When I finally got some, I was horrified to find that it was see-through!--and even more so when I tasted it...

Pooh Bear is a fraud!

when I was little my dad and brother told me that every time I ate bread I was eating a little, dead doughboy, and I believed this for years

L.M.

I convinced my sister for years that the tamarinds (fruit) in worcestershire sauce were actually tamarins (monkeys), which, as she was a precocious vegetarian, prevented her from eating it.

tim stevens

As a boy, I always thought that I wasn't allowed to eat Hershey's bars, since they were obviously intended for girls. It's right there in the name, after all: HER-SHE's bars. And the same went for "girled cheese sandwiches".

romulus

My sister and I have been competitive swimmers since age 5 or 6, so to get us to eat our dinners, my mom told us that eating fish would make us swim faster.

Samantha from California

I would see my mom turning off the oven before she took the food out of it. I thought the dials controled the kind of food she wanted. ie. she would set the control to meatloaf and the oven would make a meatloaf for her.

jb workman

Until I was about 8 or 9, I thought that rice was just chopped up spaghetti. I always wondered why sometimes my mom chopped it up and sometimes she didn't.

Greg

My grandfather got the kids to eat all the spotted bananas with brown spots by telling us that's where honey came from. That brown oozy spot is pure honey! We'd snap up the "Honey Bananas" and leave the hard yellow ones for them.

Carole

I used to believe that brocoli were little trees and that the Keebler Elves lived in them. I found out this wasn't true when I asked my mother, "Where do the elves live after we cut down their trees to eat them?"

Reece

My mom was giving us chocolate dinner rolls at supper one night. I thought because they were called rolls, they were supposed to roll on your plate. When my mom placed it in front of me, I stared at it, confused. It was just sitting still on my plate. I asked, "Why isn't it going to roll, mom?" Everyone laughed.

Kyle

when i was little i always thought that fillet mignon was flamin' yon. i thought this until i was about 14 when i saw it spelled out. i felt so stupid.

Hannah

When I was younger, my father told me that spaghetti grew on trees, and that the macaroni grew around the spaghetti like some kind of wrapping. I also thought that all the tall people ate spaghetti when they were kids and that the small people ate macaroni. So I grew up eating spaghetti all the time...

Markus

When i was young i used to eat Brown Sugar non-stop. My mum told me that if i eat it, i'd get worms. i believed her up until about i was 17 when i went shopping with her and she bought some brown sugar, and i said to her "doesn't that give you worms?" she laughed.

mara

When I was little I thought pastrami came from the middle hump of a 3-humped animal similar to the Andean alpaca or llama. This was because my father made up the story when we were eating deli sandwiches -- and I believed him!

Dan