Thursday, June 11, 2020

Cheese cat


The picture above comes from an English textbook for very young children. One of my students looked at it and said, "Look! The tiger has the cheese cat's shoes." I guess it's meant to be a leopard or something, but to him the natural assumption was that it was a cat made of cheese!

Cheshire cheese, no doubt.

6 comments:

Francis Berger said...

Perhaps the student was referring to Chester Cheetah of Cheetos fame. You know, the cat that says, "It's not easy being cheesy!" Just a thought.

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

We don't have Cheetos in Taiwan, so I doubt it. I think he thought the black spots were holes and the cat was made of Emmental.

Craig Davis said...

You are going to need a new textbook very soon. In the new edition, the tiger will have been replaced by a polar bear.

Sean G. said...

It's amazing what children see before there minds sorting abilities become complex. If you don't know what a leopard is but you know 'cheese' and 'cat', it makes sense.

To my 2 year old every circle is a ball and every blimp is an American football.

Bruce Charlton said...

This matter of cartoon cheese is interesting. It is the convention for such cheese to have holes - e.g. in Tom and Jerry); which makes a good visual shorthand for what would otherwise be merely yellow or white blocks.

But it is confusing for young children - who often don't eat real cheese (I used to eat only Dairylea - which does not taste of cheese At All); but assume cheese must have big holes.

Yet Emmental, the commonest of not many cheeses with big holes - is relatively expensive and rare. It wasn't on sale locally when I was a kid*.

So cheese of a cartoon type was something out of my experience for several years.

When I wanted my kids to eat cheese when they were young, I would laboriously makes holes in cheddar - using a plastic drinking straw; after cutting the cheese into wedge shapes.

*(Unsurprisingly we ate mostly cheddar; the village of Cheddar, where it was invented, being was only a score or so miles away.)

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

“Swiss cheese” (Emmental) is one of the most popular cheeses in the US, so most kids there are familiar with holey cheese.

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