Our friend Katy is having trouble with her children’s willingness to eat meals — or rather, their lack of willingness. And having seen said children in action I can quite understand why Katy is losing it with them; I’m only surprised she’s stuck it as long as she has. She has my sympathy — for what little that’s worth. Beyond that, not being a parent myself, I feel I should have neither an opinion nor a voice. So here’s (mostly) my experience of childhood.

I don’t remember any fights over food when I was a child. I ate whatever was put in front of me and I was expected to eat adult-style meals. There were, as far as I know, no threats like “Eat it or you go hungry”. I maybe knew I wouldn’t be given any alternative, so I’d better eat what was there; but if so it was an internal rather than an external decision. At least that is my memory.

Looking back my mother had a bad enough time coping with my father without me making things worse. I was going to say that my parents were semi-vegetarian, but that would be wrong. My father was a wannabe vegetarian; he would eat some meat (sausages and bacon always disappeared) and some fish. He would never eat offal or shellfish on the grounds that they’re all scavengers and thus unhealthy. But my mother was more wedded to meat; and it was noticeable that when my father died the vegetarian cookery books went out the house within days! So she would often feed herself and me on meat at lunchtimes, when father was at work, and then provide (semi-)vegetarian regularly in the evenings. (We kept chickens for many years so there were always eggs to be had.) And she always provided good, wholesome, balanced meals. I always enjoyed anything with cheese sauce, and her nut roast was also always good (especially as it usually appeared with a rasher of bacon!). Now how many kids would admit to liking nut roast?

I so much ate everything that my parents were surprised when, in my late teens (I guess) I did start to admit to things I didn’t like.

So I ate whatever was put in front of me. And with a few exceptions I stll eat pretty much everything. The exceptions? I can’t eat grapefruit (because of my medication; shame as I love pink grapefruit) and honeydew-type melon gives me a sore throat as does pomegranate. I dislike (but can eat if I have to) egg custard, absinthe, Pernod, jellied eels, unadulterated egg white (eg. on fried egg), raw milk and milk puddings, sweetcorn, sweet potatoes, baked apples, rum flavouring and the combination of meat with sweet. I won’t eat veal on principle. There are also few things — tripe, oysters, eyes, anything still alive — which I cannot even think of trying. With a lot of these it is a question of texture as much as flavour; with the eggy things and baked apples it is probably down to having had them too much as a kid. I actually like many of the things people generally dislike: liver, kidney, black pudding, haggis, squid, fennel, broccoli, spinach.

So does it matter how you train your children to eat? Insist they eat what’s in front of them or cater to their whims? In the short term I suspect the secret is to manage not to let the meal table become a battleground, however you achieve it. In the long term it probably doesn’t make a lot of difference what you do. Children’s palates have to mature; their tastes do change as they get older, so the trick is probably to get them to at least try everything and then probably repeat the trial every couple of years or so. Many people have to acquire the taste for things like anchovies, olives and beer; and some never will. All adults have a few things they can’t eat for whatever reason and a clutch of things they really dislike. Some have bigger no-go areas than others. But ultimately few are really very picky eaters who will tolerate only four different meals the way many kids seem to.

Now remind me why didn’t we have children?