Food technology
Toys that really cooked
Turns out you can create a whole dinner menu based on foods made by toys. So we did. Bon appetit!
With the sad-making news last week that the Easy-Bake Oven as we know it will be going to the Great Incinerator in the Sky, we here at Salon Food started reminiscing over our own toy food memories. There were the Easy-Bake knockoff Chuck E. Cheese pizza ovens, there were the heartbreakingly dear Snoopy Sno Cones, there were the furiously lame Queasy-Bake Cookerator Dip n’ Drool Dog Bones.
It wasn’t long, then, before Aviva Shen, editorial fellow extraordinaire, realized that you could put together a whole menu of toy-made foods: “Basically,” she said, looking at dozens of Easy-Bake bootlegs, including one that grilled hamburgers, “if a child had to survive on toy oven food alone, they could do it … though they would quickly develop diabetes.”
Bah! A small price to pay for self-reliance! And probably no more dangerous than giving hormone-charged 17-year-olds keys to thousands of pounds of rocketing steel. (Probably.) So we scoured history to find the finest play-date victuals. Please, sit back and enjoy our menu of toy-made foods.
Francis Lam is Features Editor at Gilt Taste, provides color commentary for the Cooking Channel show Food(ography), and tweets at @francis_lam. More Francis Lam.
