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.

Almost every parent wants the best for their child, but they are frequently too hung up on the indignities of the past to see the real problems in front of them or to separate a child’s needs from their own urges.

Much of what we learn about eating comes from the way our parents feed us.

Most of our approaches to feeding children are too short term. We worry about the next five minutes when we should worry about the next five years.

The art of feeding, it turns out, is not about pushing ‘one more bite’ into someone’s mouth, however healthy the food. Nor is it about authoritarian demands to abstain from all treats. It is about creating a mealtime environment where those eating are free to develop their own tastes, because all the choices on the table are real, whole food.

Feeding, like eating, is a learned behaviour and the methods that most parents absorb for doing it are based on the values of former times when a child needed to be protected from scarcity rather than plenty.

The way we reward children with food is based on folk memories of a food supply that has not existed in the West for decades, when white sugar was so rare it seemed to sparkle like snow.

The true objective is independence: for a child to reach the point where they can regulate their own intake of food and to choose the things that will do them good while giving them pleasure. Weaning them off milk is one thing. But the real task for a parent is to wean children off needing you.

What is so damaging about our gendered approach to food is that it encourages both boys and girls to feed themselves in ways that go against what their bodies require. We have got things the wrong way round. It is girls more than boys who need the most haemoglobin-boosting foods. And boys more than girls are lacking in salad and vegetables. Girl food and boy food are dangerous nonsense that prevents us from seeing the real problems of feeding boys and girls.