Fruit, Anyone?

There is a trend out there that I simply do not understand, and that is the practice of comparing the size of a baby growing in the womb to various fruits and vegetables. As the growth of your fetus progresses, you are cheerfully told - it's now the size of a lentil! Ooh, now it's as big as a pineapple (quite the growth spurt there)!

Now, I feel there are several flaws in this system. First, it may just be me, but it seems that comparing your growing child to something you ingest just seems wrong. The baby is already inside of you, do you have to start thinking of it as if it were something you ate? "Oops, I ate a poppy seed and over the course of forty weeks it has gone from poppy seed to blueberry to lime to squash to oh my gosh it's a baby!" Weird. But maybe that's just me.

On a more universal area of complaint, any one who has ever been through the produce section of their grocery store, regardless of whether or not they consume fruits and vegetables, knows that the size of produce varies. Sometimes greatly. There are farmers out there growing strawberries the size of your hand, and there are those little tiny wild strawberries you find that are the size of your pinky nail. I mean, we're not really talking about a standard system of measurement here.

On top of that, they have chosen some rather obscure fruits and vegetables for you to compare your fetus to. Your child is now the size of a kumquat. Who in the heck has seen a kumquat, much less eaten one? I for one don't have a clue how big or small a kumquat is? Others making the list of obscure fruits and vegetables: fig (I mean, we've all had the newtons, but have you ever actually eaten a fig?), turnip (you hear about them, but they are sort of mystical), rutabaga, jicama (I doubt I ever would have seen a jicama if it weren't for dear Shelly and the vegetable experimentations of '04), and crenshaw melon. Yes, at 36 weeks, the baby is the size of a crenshaw melon.

I talked to a friend at work about this, and he suggested that they set up this system because women have a hard time getting a visual when they hear something like "two inches" or "almost an ounce." I found that vaguely insulting, but he may be right. I suppose it's nice to get a visual, but still... could they not have chosen something a bit more appropriate, consistent, and - heck - at least commonly known to give women an idea of the size of the little person inside them? Anyone have any suggestions? We could revolutionize the whole industry of baby-measurement-comparisons.

In any case, ours is the size of a lime.