My mum says I was a bad eater as a child. The eating itself wasn’t a problem, you understand. I could eat things. I just put them in my mouth, chewed them and swallowed them in the traditional way. It was the range of things that I ate, or rather didn’t eat, that seemed to be the problem. It was all actual food, mind you. I wasn’t wolfing down a nightly feast of cardboard boxes, tungsten drill-heads and Tupperware, like some ravenous pregnant woman with the world’s weirdest case of cravings. As I understand it, I would choose one or two foods, and then eat nothing but that thing or those things for months at a time, to the exclusion of all other foods and food groups. One month it might be sweetcorn, another corned beef, another it might be, oh, I don’t know, Monster Munch on toast in a sardine marinade sprinkled with hundreds of thousands.

My mum worried about me because I wasn’t getting enough nutrients, or vitamins, or Mega Threes, or Flava-flavins, or frogs’ eyes, or whatever magic constituents lurk inside our food to make it wholesome and worthy. Her worry drove her to war, a war of attrition fought nightly on the battlefield of our dinner table, over which hallowed ground she would deliver her valiant war cry: “And if you think you’re leaving that bloody table before you’ve eaten every last piece of your dinner, you’ve got another bloody thing coming!”

Or she’d reference the Africans, and try to make me feel guilty for having food to waste. I always wondered why – if she cared so much – she didn’t donate money and tins of food to Africa on a weekly basis, but I was too young – and in any case too smart – to articulate this sense of hypocrisy. I always imagined slopping my mum’s mince and tatties into a big envelope with ‘C/O The Africans’ written on it and then posting it to them, only to find it returning weeks later because the Africans weren’t up for eating it either.

[as I got older I took to wondering why it was always the Africans who were starving. Weren’t the Vanuatuans or the Malaysians or the Peruvians ever hungry? I came to the conclusion that the Africans must’ve had a better PR guy]

I spent my childhood as a political prisoner, and that dinner table was my Robben Island. I’d go on hunger strike after hunger strike, fighting an endlessly raging war for sovereignty over my own stomach. Every fifteen minutes or so my mother’s scowl would appear through a crack in the kitchen door, and she’d snarl, ‘I MEAN IT’ or ‘YOU’D BETTER START EATING’, and I’d stare at the cooling meal on the table before me and wonder if I was going to buckle; wondered if it would be better just to swallow my pride, along with some freezing cold chips.

Turns out, though, I was really, really good at being stubborn. Really good. This came as a shock to my mother, who’d always considered herself the most stubborn person who’d ever lived; the sort of woman who’d hesitate to swerve first in a game of chicken with a train being propelled along the track by a nuclear missile. I’d sit there at that dinner table for hours and endless hours, bored yet determined. I’d wait for the force and frequency of the ‘I MEAN Its’ to wither and wain, which they always did (if only because mum liked to sit in the kitchen at night, and didn’t want to share her sacred space with a belligerent mute).

Gradually her anger and determination would sputter and fade, like a fire starved of oxygen, and eventually she’d walk into the kitchen, eyes downcast, her face a stoic mask, and she’d say, softly but sternly, ‘Go – get out of my sight’, and I’d try to hiss my ‘yessssss’ of victory as quietly as possible so as not to breach the terms of my release.

Sometimes she’d say, “And you’d better not grow up to be the sort of person who compares himself to Nelson Mandela in a blog about being a fussy eater as a child, because if I catch you devaluing or trivialising the political, racial and racist turmoil in South Africa in the late 20^th century, you’ll hear me, boy!”

Sometimes I’d have a schedule to keep – a game to play, a comic to write, I dunno, a nose to pick or something – and couldn’t afford to lose my precious leisure time staring at a plate of cold fish fingers. I’d eschew potentially lengthy direct action for an altogether sneakier tactic of pretending that I’d cleared the plate by surreptitiously disposing of the food. I always needed a meticulously thought-out, fool-proof plan; my mother was an almost omniscient opponent. She considered every eventuality and side-effect, like some human distillation of the Breaking Bad writers’ room.

The most seemingly obvious course of action was feeding the unwanted food to our dog, but that, I quickly learned, was the surest route to discovery. The dog wasn’t a wily co-conspirator: he was just a greedy beast. He’d dive-bomb the bowl with his nose, nudging and smacking and chomping and grunting, attacking it with the single-minded ferocity of a shark feasting on a lacerated leg, until his bowl was clattering like a man-hole cover a giant had spun like a penny and was now noisily losing momentum. The activity couldn’t have been more conspicuous had our parrot started screeching ‘HE’S FEEDING THE DOG HIS MINCE AND TATTIES! HE’S FEEDING THE DOG HIS MINCE AND TATTIES!’ – especially considering that we didn’t even have a parrot.

I couldn’t instead choose to hand-feed the leftovers to the dog piece by piece from the comfort of my chair, as one bite would’ve had the dog camped next to me salivating and wagging his tail long after the food was finished, certainly long enough for his proximity and excitement to betray my actions.

I’d have to get creative. Sometimes I’d smuggle mounds and scraps of food out of the room up my sleeve or down my sock, taking little pieces at a time, and in the process transforming mealtimes into a lower-stakes version of The Great Escape. My mum’s ears were ever alert to the flushing of the toilet – she was always one step ahead – so I’d have to get creative when disposing of the evidence. I’d hide food down the back of my bed, inside cupboards and sock-drawers, with a view to properly disposing of it later. Sometimes, amateur that I am, I neglected that last part. Once, I completely forgot that I’d stuffed six Richmond sausages inside my Emu hand-puppet. Rotting pig meat tends to signal its presence somewhat. Naturally, my stinking stash was discovered, and I was hauled before our cottage’s kangaroo court. I should’ve claimed that my Emu was a hyper-realistic bird, with semi-functional intestines and everything, but I was assigned a thoroughly uncreative and shit lawyer: myself.

And so the war raged on.

I’ve been thinking about these tea-time sieges more and more since becoming a parent: now that the terrorised has become the terrorist, if you like. I know how difficult it is to get kids to eat food that’s good for them; hell, sometimes you can’t even get them to eat the beige stuff that’s really bad for them. When our eldest was a baby and a toddler – even up until very recently – he would eat anything that was presented to him, from the ridiculous to the sublime, the exotic to the execrable, the delicious to the … not quite so delicious.

While other parents might’ve fretted about their young ‘uns forsaking the son-of-a-bitch broccoli, the mother-effing manges tout and the C-word cauliflower, we were hard-pressed to stop our child from eating. It’s definitely a family trait. His younger brother, now almost two, is exactly the same, but perhaps times a billion. He eats everything in his path. He’s a plague given human shape; a bipedal shark. He’ll eat his dinner, then beg and scream for his brother’s, then ours, then the cat’s. He’ll follow us around the house making munching noises and nodding his head in vigorous agreement with himself, thinking his nods are strong enough to open the fridge and cupboard doors and cause food to fly out of them and straight into his mouth.

His big brother is four, and for a while now he’s been threatening to enlist full-time in the same child-army regiment I fought in during the great dinner-table wars of the 1980s and 90s. Now it’s my turn to fret. You worry when your child starts to become fussy about their food, or starts eating less, you do. You can’t help it. You worry they’ll get rickets or scurvy, or that child services will eventually send a SWAT TEAM to infiltrate your house armed with lentils and quinoa. You panic that a judge will throw the book at you for mis-feeding and starving your kids, and sentence you to waddle naked through the streets as morbidly obese people whip your exposed back with strawberry laces.

So how do you make them eat, while managing to keep on the right side of the UN conventions on torture?

When they’re very young you can do the aeroplane thing with their food. You know what I mean. You pick up the spoon, shovel some food onto it, look them straight in the eye, bring the spoon up into the air, and say, ‘Eat this, you son of a bitch, or you’ll be on the first fucking plane to Mexico!’

But that only works for so long.

If they absolutely refuse to try a new food, especially if it’s some hitherto undiscovered vegetable, you can trick them into thinking they’re missing out on the tastiest food in the universe by shoving a piece of it in your mouth and being as overly demonstrative about how delicious it is as you can, to the point where you’re having PG-rated orgasms right there before their very eyes (even though you think it’s horrendous, too).

“Oh my God, GOD, what IS this? Mummy, have you TRIED this? OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD! OH, I NEED THIS! I NEED THIS EVERY NIGHT! OH JESUS CHRIST! I need a cigarette…”

In your determination to see them eat good food you’re forced to become an expert negotiator, carving up meals like they’re mineral rights; or pacing up and down next to the dinner table like a frazzled detective trying to nail a confession from a killer.

“OK, how about you eat all of this chicken breast, half of the carrots and two potatoes, and then we can all walk away happy? How about you do that?”

“You trying to insult me? How about I spit on your offer? How about I do that?”

“You wanna play hard-ball, huh? OK, wiseguy, a quarter of the carrots and one potato. But that’s my FINAL offer.”

“Well here’s MY final offer: suck my balls!”

“That’s cute. You want I should take my offer off the table?”

“I want you to take EVERYTHING off the table. Literally, take it, get it the fuck off the table, I won’t eat it, ANY of it.”

“YOU STUPID SON OF A BITCH, YOU’RE KILLING ME HERE, YOU KNOW THAT? [slams table with palm of hand] HERE IT IS! THREE BITES OF CHICKEN. AND A CARROT!”

“NO!”

“TWO BITES OF CHICKEN AND HALF A CARROT!!!”

“I want my lawyer.”

“EAT IT! EAT IT, DAMN YOU, OR I’LL JAM IT DOWN YOUR GOD DAMNED THROAT.”

[folds arms, stares straight ahead, shakes head]

“Tough guy, eh? [leans in dead close] Well let me tell you something, here, tough guy. It’s going to be a long… long… long… hungry night for you, boy. I’ll SEE to that.”

[thinks] [checks watch] “Can I have a biscuit to tide me over?”

“CAN YOU FUCK!!”

Sorry about that. I got a bit carried away there.

So, in a nut-shell (they probably won’t eat that either) your options are limited. If your child won’t eat x amount of x, y or z, sure you can threaten to take away their toy, TV or game time – or else flip it and offer to reward them these things if they eat – but then you risk linking their feelings of reward and gratification with food, and potentially giving them some sort of sexual hang-up, eating disorder, or hideous combination of both, in later life.

When our eldest son was a toddler and new to the concepts of speech and reality we employed a rather surreal tactic in our bid to make him clear his plate, one that miraculously worked. He wanted to be a Ghostbuster, so we told him that there were ghosts outside in the hallway that he could only bust once he’d eaten enough food to give him ghost-power. Yes it worked; but it worked precisely twice. Kids adapt more quickly than the Borg.

Still, most children seem to go through a few strange eating cycles as they grow, and most emerge into adolescence and adulthood with a healthy, balanced diet – even the Scottish ones. It’s certainly tough balancing your children’s burgeoning sense of their own independence and autonomy against your responsibility for maintaining their well-being and looking out for their best interests. Left to their own ids and devices, most kids would happily wave away a healthy meal in favour of an artery-busting snack-a-thon of six packets of crisps, twelve Jaffa Cakes and a triple-chocolate mousse washed down with 6 litres of Cola, and not regret a second of it until they were a 36-year-old fat, diabetic, toothless maniac about to take you to court for food-based child abuse.

You don’t want to send your kids to bed hungry, chain them to the dinner table or literally shove green beans down their throats, but you don’t want to cede total control, either. Even if your efforts ultimately prove futile, it’s always a good idea to keep flying the flag for Team Green.

Or at least Team Not Beige.

Maybe there won’t be a dinner-table war between us and our children; maybe we’ll just have a series of skirmishes, or the odd memorable battle.

But one thing’s for sure: whatever forms of culinary conflict lie ahead, my partner and I very much look forward to losing at all of them.

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Thanks for reading, you beautiful specimen of humanity. What memories do you have of being locked in battle with your parents over the dinner plate? What strategies have you used with your own kids to get them to eat?

Leave a comment below this article, or on the Jamie Andrew With Hands Facebook page. Let’s talk.