Play has long been understood as an important pedagogical practice, particularly in ECEC  settings, yet playing with food during mealtimes has been overlooked or undervalued. The apparent dichotomy between rule-following and playfulness at mealtimes has led to a paucity of research on food play. Adopting an ethnomethodological approach that seeks to describe social activities from the participants’ own perspectives, this paper examines instances in which young children initiate pretend play with their food during mealtimes. Data is taken from a large corpus of video-recorded lunches in Swedish preschools and a collection of pretend play sequences were analysed using multimodal conversation analysis. The results show that pretend play is multimodally achieved, directed first to teachers, often involves other children, and enables the multiactivity of playing and eating. Moreover, the analysis illustrates how food is handled to allow for the initiation of pretence scenarios and for sharing those imaginary worlds with other participants at the table, especially the teachers. Accepting the invitation, teacher’s responses were fitted to narratively build on and contribute to the imaginary events, while at the same time orienting towards the progression of the meal. The findings are discussed in terms of the pedagogical work of teachers, whose efforts to ratify the children’s perspectives and trigger their imagination co-exist with the institutional demands of eating lunch together.