Playing With Our Food

BY JUSTINE SEO PHOTO BY PINN CHIRATHIVAT

It’s amazing the amount of inedible matter that enters our digestive system before the age of 10. Rubber Polly Pocket clothes, swallowed bubble gum — even if you read past the first couple of ingredients on a Lucky Charms box, you’d be skeptical of their labelling as a breakfast item instead of a chemical reaction.

“Perhaps the most shocking item that we regularly consumed, however, was neither food nor toy, but instead claimed to be a strange blend between the two.”

Enter fake-but-real DIY food toys, an amalgam of chemicals and plastic appliances that allowed kindergarteners to whip up cakes, cookies, burgers, and the like. This fascination with making food into a vehicle for playtime doesn’t end there. Some of my fondest memories were made exchanging plastic fruit for fake dollars over a toy cash register, or pretending to make a meal with the wooden appliances at the Pottery Barn Kid store. In America, the Easy-Bake Oven was huge, selling over 30 million units since its introduction in 1963, and for many decades was seen as the most desirable toy on the market, immediately making the house of whoever owned one the coolest spot to hang out. In the early 2010’s, Popin Cookin, a Japanese toy kit in which you mix up water with various powders and microwave them to make Play-Dohlike blobs that resemble food, became the new hot thing in toy-foods. In fourth grade, my friends and I were infatuated by these odd food-like forms, using our limited computer lab screen time to watch YouTube videos of people making them and waiting weeks for our own packages to arrive after begging our parents to order them for us from Japan. We even replaced the perfectly fine (and real) snacks that our after school program gave us with these microwaved paste balls. It seems like these food-based items were attempts to make the tedious motions that we would one day have to go through as adults intriguing, exciting — either in hopes of teaching us how to blend into society or to make us excited about the monotonous tasks and grocery list items we would one day dread. It is easy to fall out of love with the act of buying and cooking food, even though it is such a wonderful thing. So while we might never go back to the days when pulling an undercooked cupcake out of an LED-light fueled oven gave us an overwhelming sense of joy, we should harbor a similar appreciation for all the food we eat, whether or not it came from an Easy Bake.