It is possible to educate children in the pleasures of food; and that doing so will set the children up for a lifetime of healthy eating. Feeding is learning.

Learning to eat a good and varied diet is a key part of every child’s education.

But almost no one speaks of building up girls - these delicate soufflé-nibbling creatures who ought to be able to survive on air and compliments. Instead, a great focus is placed on building up their brothers, stoking them with dangerous delusions about how much food they need. In the current food environment, the overfeeding of boys is no more helpful than the underfeeding of girls.

It is curious that we talk so little about the flavour of formula, given that it is the main food many babies taste for that crucial first year.

In most places, for most of history, children’s food has not existed as a separate category after the age of weaning.

We know that letting our children eat too many sweets makes us a bad parent, hence the pointless ritual at Halloween when parents allow their children to go from house to house accumulating a big haul of treats, only to confiscate them at the end of the night, because they don’t want their child to get cavities. Yes despite their anxiety about sweets, parents will happily feed their children highly sweetened sports bars, fruit snacks and cereals which are sweets in all but name.

While the form of ‘kid food’ is more varied than ever, however, the content is far less so. Foods marketed specifically at children tend to be higher than average in salt, sugar and fat.

How can wholesome nursery food compete with hundreds of new and heavily advertised concoctions, calculated to appeal to a child’s sense of novelty?

Have you noticed that when someone wants to express that something tastes extra specially wonderful, they will often invoke childhood?