We mostly cook from scratch, always produce a regular Sunday Roast, occasionally dine out in fine restaurants and  enjoy Indian and Chinese food. Yet somehow, we have managed to raise a couple of ‘chicken nugget’ kids – suspicious of everything except wafer thin ham and sausages…

I’ve watched my seven year old son carefully scrape off the sauce from length upon length of spaghetti, pluck out tiny slivers of ‘grass’ (Rosemary) from his Bolognese and separate out the ‘bits’ in his yoghurt.

“I don’t like that,” is usually uttered before he’s even tried whatever is placed in front of him. Yet, one hour later he’ll happily transfer the contents of his nose into his mouth…

So what’s the solution?

Hard labour.

After a day of rock climbing, swimming, snowboarding etc. he’ll quite happily tuck into whatever is on mum and dad’s plate, usually without too much examination of the contents. As long as we don’t bring attention to what he’s eating, he will usually clear the plate. In this, he is just like that cartoon character walking over the cliff edge, he won’t actually fall until he’s noticed he’s standing in mid-air. We know if we were to point out that he’s just eaten a courgette, then he will never ever eat another courgette again.

As for my daughter, well it’s a lost cause.

“What you eating Daddy?”

“Why do you ask? Because you don’t like anything.”

“I like mini-cheddars!”