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Comment by Sleeep | Hacker News Reader

Why does the author's wife think that chewing meat causes choking? This seems like a rather bizarre belief - does this have any basis in reality? If anything I'd think that learning to chew your food well from a young age would make you less likely to choke. (and more likely to moderate your food intake)

It seem like the equivalent of "don't let them walk, they will just fall and get a concussion"

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Do you have kids? Everybody thinks everything causes choking. People stop you on the street to tell you how to feed your toddlers. Grapes were particularly suspect in our neighborhood. People cut them in half, believing it was safer.

You are right, I'm sure, about chewing being important to learn; and it would have to be a tiny piece in order for it to be hard to choke on it, anyway, so cutting it small certainly won't usually help.

I don't know how frequent kids choking is. All I know is that their gag reflex is pretty powerful and should keep them out of danger (for the most part).

Well, grapes do cause choking in young kids. Just the right size to wedge in the airway. But yeah I'm sure many warnings are overdone.

I don't doubt it! I just can't imagine that half a grape is safer than a whole grape for small kids.

A half is much safer because the skin is split.

The whole reason that grapes are dangerous for small kids is that the throat can't break the skin.

Of course, better to tell them to bite first.

I cringe a bit when I see people do the throwing the grape in the air and catch it in their mouths.

There's a common risk mitigation technique which is something like "don't be weird around important stuff". So you can be weird in your cooking, or write a weird song, but when you are at the doctor's office, be normal.

It's not crazy. It would drive me crazy, because I like to learn the why's and how's of things. But I can acknowledge it's a decently adaptive strategy.

It's probably less and less effective though, as "normal" is becoming more and more just shorthand for "how the corporations think you should act".

Although that, too, is probably somewhat adaptive to get in line with.

She believed that their children would try to swallow without chewing their meat enough, and thus choke if the meat was in too big of pieces.

Tat reminds me of the time when one of our kids was about 6 and slammed down a couple of hot dogs without buns and ran upstairs to return to playing and barfed. The hot dog pieces that came out were very clearly not chewed. It was an interesting learning experience all around.

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