I don’t want to undermine my international standing as a gourmand (you are, after all, looking at the woman who once ate the entire Bella Italia Valentine’s Day menu on her own, in a single sitting) but I think I may be giving up on so-called “adult food”.
It probably says something about my life, in terms of nutrition, shopping and planning, but this week I have eaten: three packets of Pom-Bear crisps, a bowl of Coco Pops, two Bear yoyo bars, a Petits Filous yoghurt and an ice lolly in the shape of a rocket. They were all absolutely delicious. Put them on a restaurant menu and you’d be rich.
The thing about eating children’s snacks is that they offer the twin hedonism of theft and blandness. I have never actually bought a packet of veggie straws or a small box of raisins with the express intention of eating them myself – but, as a parent, these things just exist tantalisingly within my orbit. Along with pizza crusts, fish fingers, carrot sticks, cartons of juice and small cubes of cheese, they are almost wantonly easy to steal off my own child. And so I rustle them.
As for the question of taste: perhaps one of the most excruciating hangovers of my life was spent on a slow train through the Trent valley, on the way back from Liverpool, with a restless, breastfeeding toddler on my lap, during which I ate three – yes, three – packets of completely flavourless corn puffs. The best that could really be said for them was that they were slightly less oily than either normal crisps or my hair. And yet, if asked to identify one of my life’s truly great snacks, I’d pick them every time. It wasn’t great when we pulled into Euston and my son had nothing left to eat but ultimately it was worth it. Sometimes, morality quails in the face of maize.
We don’t actually know if Hippocrates ever said, “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food”. But I bet he would have gone hog wild for a malted milk biscuit.
• Nell Frizzell is the author of Holding the Baby: Milk, Sweat and Tears from the Frontline of Motherhood
