Babies Eating Lemons

About

Babies Eating Lemons refers to a reaction video trend where parents film themselves feeding limes or lemons to their babies, anticipating the baby’s surprise at the sour taste. The videos are popular as compilations.

Origin

The first known videos of babies eating lemons or limes appeared in 2006. Uploaded July 8th, 2006 by user stinkerbella, “Baby Eats a Lime” (below) featured a home video recording of a baby named Holiday at a party where her parents claim she loves lime. As Holiday eats the lime, she makes a series of funny pucker faces. The later video, uploaded August 20th, 2006 by user melangelo’s channel (embedding disabled, but can be viewed here) was titled “Angelo Eating Lime” and featured a baby in a high chair surrounded by older children, who are feeding the baby a slice of lime. The two videos each gained more than 2 million views by June 2015.

Spread

In 2007, several videos of babies eating lemons became popular, including “Baby Eats a Sour Lemon”(below top left), uploaded by user dsulliv on April 2nd, 2007 which has more than 7,200,000 views as of June 2015, and “Lemon baby”(below top right), uploaded May 17th, 2007, which has more than 3,100,000 views in the same time span. “Baby Eats a Sour Lemon” in particular has been freebooted and mirrored several times, and in addition continues to be shared on reddit and elsewhere frequently. However, many of the most upvoted reddit links link to a video, shared in 2011, that is now private. Considering the correlation with search interest, it appears that this video might be where mass interest in babies eating lemons occurred.^[1]

Feeding a lemon to one’s baby and filming the results became a frequent type of video upload – the most popular videos featuring babies eating lemons are compilations collecting many different baby reaction videos. One such compilation, “Babies Eating Lemons for the First Time Compilation 2013 [HD]” (below bottom left), uploaded by the cute video aggregator funnyplox, has over 24 million views as of June 2015. A search of YouTube for “baby eating lemon” returns over 48,000 results.^[2]

Babies Eating Wasabi

After babies eating lemon became popular, parents began filming their babies eating other types of things, most notably the spicy Japanese horseradish wasabi. As of June 2015, over 11,000 videos are returned in a search for “babies eating wasabi”^[3]. The most popular such video was uploaded August 18th, 2011 by user lanaxj. It has over 83,000 views as of June 2015.