You’ll drool over the sharp color photos, taken of a cornucopia of real fruits and vegetables, carved, posed, or assembled to look like animals and objects. The food creatures, made from bananas, peppers, cherries, mushrooms, and more—there's a list of the more than 75 ingredients on the copyright page—demonstrate a series of simple concepts all young children need to know: shapes, colors, numbers, letters, and opposites. The comical expressions on the "faces" of the creatures will get children grinning, especially when they can identify the animals and the produce used to construct them, including frogs carved from green peppers, sheep made out of nubby cauliflower florets, and a snowman assembled from white mushroom caps.

As you turn the pages, ask your children to tell you what these "animals" might be thinking and saying to each other. Try assembling new critters from food in the fridge. Your kids could even help you make fruit salad or vegetable soup, though that might feel a tad irreverent after bonding with the groceries. When you take the kids shopping at the market, they’ll forevermore be pointing out produce with personality.

Themes: ENGLISH LANGUAGE. FOOD.