To eat these foods again in the new country was a way of holding on to the grandmothers and mothers who had first cooked with them. Often, however, the remembering through food is bittersweet, because even when you have tracked down every last herb and spice, the missing ingredient is the cook. You find you don’t want pasta ‘just like Mama used to make’; you actually want Mama herself.

The flavour of sweet milk is perhaps the most firmly imprinted of all food memories in Western culture.

The main way that anyone learns to like new foods is through repeated exposure.

With good cooking and a patient but persistent approach at mealtimes, it could be food that was both good for the children and enjoyable.

What children need is to develop the skills to navigate the environment for themselves.

Large numbers of adults as well as children have now become habituated to eating a version of ‘kid food’ over a whole lifetime: sweet, salty, undemanding to chew and swallow and heavily processed.

Flavour has a remarkable ability to imprint itself on our memories and therefore to drive our future food choices.

When parents as well as children are eating ‘kid food’, perhaps it’s time to call not something else. ‘Kid food’ started off as something separate and different from normal food. Now it is close to being the new normal for all age groups. The danger is that when adults have childish tastes too, it becomes very difficult for anyone to break the cycle and learn the pleasures of real food.

It is a lonely occupation, being someone who wrestles to control their responses to food, given that modern life is steeped with things to eat, both real and imaginary.