Plastic fruit

I was a deprived kid. I didn’t have an easy bake oven. I didn’t have a Snoopy snow cone machine. But I did have a toy kitchen with a “working” sink and a shopping cart with plastic food but somehow I think my daughter's experience may be quite different from mine.

The other day, Suzanne and her French-English friend M (who she calls Tu’la) had fun playing with the shopping cart M got for her 1^st birthday. Whereas I had a shopping cart full of apples, oranges, bananas and the occasional red pepper. Our girls were playing with bananas, a navel orange, a beef steak tomatoes, bulbs of fennel, bunches of leeks and head of lettuce.

I’m not sure if this says something about the way kids are raised in France as mini-gourmets (remember the baby food flavors?), something about American eating habits or just plain cultural differences.

But it was hysterical watching my daughter juggling a bulb of fennel in one hand, leeks in the other and a bunch of bananas hanging out of her mouth.

Then again, who am I to talk? Doesn't my child regularly play with a piece of horse radish root from her toy seder plate?