Each bite that you see the other person take reinforces your liking. Or not: it is hard to sit calmly by and carry on eating if you share a table with someone who is grumbling that peas are ‘gross’ and pinging them at you with a knife.

The social pressure to eat according to your sex matters more than it seems. For one thing, it undermines our pleasure in eating, which is seldom a good idea. women often deny themselves the dish they might really want pn the menu because they feel it isn’t “appropriate”.

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.

Contrary to the impression given by the health pages of newspapers, the greatest single nutritional shortfall in our diets right now is not our failure to eat enough ‘superfoods’, whatever those might be. It is the iron deficiency of girls.

Chocolate’s status as food for girls and women - something to be yearned for and then regretted - is so ingrained that it would be easy to assume that there is something deep within females that makes them crave chocolate.

Being able to regulate the amount of food we eat according to our needs is perhaps the single most important skill when it comes to eating, and the one that we leat often master.

Very little of the eating that happens in the modern world is as simple as: feel hungry, eat food. The great challenge for most people is learning how to recognise when we have had enough.

One of the commonest ways our eating goes wrong is that we consistently choose foods that offer immediate satiation in the belly rather than longer lasting satiety.

Very little about the way we eat is, in fact, logical.