Why kids should eat what they’re given

What sort of dang fool allows their child to choose what they eat? I only ask because Great British Bake Off champion Nancy Birtwhistle has been sounding off about mothers who cook-to-order for their offspring.

It’s a waste of energy and wasteful of food and a terrible indictment of today’s pusillanimous pushover parenting.

I paraphrase, but you get the gist. And Birtwhistle’s right, of course. Zero tolerance: it’s what children’s cookery tsarina Annabel Karmel told me when I met her.

And it’s advice that I pass on to every new mother: don’t encourage choice of any sort. Cut out the “would you like the blue cup or the red cup?” malarkey.

Save yourselves, I urge them. Children make bad choices. All the time.

Beneath those Boden stripes there beats the heart of a fast-food-addicted guttersnipe happy to breakfast on Nutella, luncheon on chips and dine on Monster Munch.

It’s too late for me. My six-year-old has the ascetic palate of an Amish preacher: currently brown bread and butter, green beans and yoghurt.

I’ve done the wheedling thing and the shouting thing and the “eat your delicious balanced supper or I’ll put a tube up Barbie’s nose and force feed it to her” thing.

All I get is lashings of tears, and shouting for afters.

Might I respectfully note that Birtwhistle is a grandmother of eight and thus entitled (expected…?) to dish out helpings of advice.

But crucially, once she’s plated it up, she is under no obligation to hang around and deal with the messy consequences.

Beneath those Boden stripes there beats the heart of a fast-food-addicted guttersnipe