Every bite is a game of roulette if you dine with Scots

Here’s something I didn’t know until the summer holidays started: America’s doors are closed to Kinder eggs. You must r e member Kinder surprises: the surprise being that they contain both chocolate AND a toy.

Ironically, that is why they are banned in the Us; apparently assault rifles are OK but chocolate eggs with toys in them are a ‘safety hazard’.

The concern is that hungry children might mistake the cheapo models of cars, dolls, Minions and Guardians of the Galaxy for food and end up choking to death.

The Americans really mean it too. A well-intentioned friend took a couple with her to New York as gifts, had her bags searched and wass ternly divested of the eggs.

she got off lightly: strictly speaking, if you are found holding Kinder contraband, Us officials can fine you $2,500 per egg.

Don’t get me wrong, children are stupid. I know, I was one several million years ago, when monkeys were still fish.

Among my precocious experiments were popping rubber gloves into a toaster; cutting my sister’s hair with pinking shears; floating out to sea on a lilo and having to be rescued by a man in a yacht on his way to Arran; playing a game with my sister called ‘that didn’t hurt’, which never, ever ended well.

Yet I never considered swallowing the inner contents of a Kinder egg. In fact, in 40 years there have been only three Kinder fatalities, according to Wikipedia, which is peanuts compared to, say... peanuts.

And this despite a brief, and admittedly non-scientific, survey of friends which revealed that scottish children are not exactly discriminating consumers.

One friend enjoyed building snowmen in his back garden, then l i cking them. Another would create tents out of blankets on the washing line, then settle down to eat Oxo cubes.

My youngest sister used to serve ready-made soup to her four-year-old friends made out of water and toothpaste, which admittedly sounds more tasty and nutritious than real instant soups. sister No 2 liked to steal our hamster’s sunflower seeds and nuts.

My father, a war baby growing up in the east end of Glasgow, enjoyed picking up used matches from gutters and sucking them for their salt. And an alarming number of friends and family admit to pauchling their dog’s biscuits as a snack to enjoy while watching Doctor Who or star Trek.

Are any of these worse than the new Doritos roulettes, a bag of tortilla chips, where one in every handful is coated with chilli powder that is ten times hotter than a jalapeno pepper?

Last week, an asthmatic schoolgirl claimed that the extreme eating experience made it hard for her to breathe.

That actually sounds frightening. Yet somewhere between the jittery neuroticism of banning Kinders and idiocy of selling crisps that are almost as hot as a scotch bonnet chilli, there has to be a middle ground of allowing kids to choose their food in a world where junk disguised as nutrition has made healthy eating increasingly confusing.

surprisingly, the most brilliant solution came from sister No 2, who prefaces family food choices with ‘what do you think Batman would eat?’

I love the unpressured simplicity of this. But I still say no when she offers round the nuts.