They can persist in trying to plot a healthy path through the labyrinthine deceits and dangers of the children’s food industry or renounce it by reintegrating children into mainstream eating by cooking straightforward meals for everyone in a household, made from scratch from good ingredients Grill chicken instead of serving nuggets Buy good quality steak mince and make your own burgers Roast nuts in the oven instead of handing out crisps If the kids don’t like it tell them that’s all there is If you don’t have junk in the house they can’t eat junk. Such an attitude used to sound like an extreme, even reactionary solution Now it’s beginning to look like the only practical one. Despite a review of research carried out for the Food Standards Agency which told us what we all knew – that advertising does influence children’s food choices – the Government still won’t bite the bullet and ban it as other progressive countries have, but falls back instead on gentle exhortations to industry to put its house in order by way of voluntary schemes.Last week there was another groundhog day when research from Southampton University substantiated the fairly unamazing observation that certain additives cause attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Kids’ junk is so ubiquitous, the logic ran, that it must be okay because government wouldn’t just stand by while evil companies damaged our children’s health for profit, would it? Now that the obesity time-bomb has hit the headlines, chronic unease among parents has grown acute. But it’s still business as usual with the Government’s laissez-faire attitude to children’s food.

Many had believed that although the contents of their children’s diet seemed counter-intuitive to any notion of healthy eating, there was comfort from the feeling of safety in numbers. Meanwhile down the road at Tesco, Friends of the Earth discovered Kids Snack Pack Carrots on sale at 13 times the price of the chain’s “Value”‘ carrots.Back in the kitchen where they are struggling against what the Health Development Agency last week labelled an “obesogenic” environment, parents are tired of fighting personal responsibility battles and feel totally let down. A 2003 Food Standards Agency survey found that own-label children’s meals at Asda – spaghetti with meatballs, shepherd’s pie and macaroni cheese – contained 48 per cent, 46 per cent and 42 per cent respectively of a child’s recommended daily salt intake. Waitrose’s Food Explorers, for example, claims to be “good for children”. Adverts say “what may sound like kid’s junk food is, in fact, healthy food”. But parents who thought they understood the basics of healthy eating might be at a loss to understand what was especially nutritious about items in this range such as raspberry ripple flavoured water, toffee caramel balls breakfast cereal or squirtable toffee sauce.

In most supermarkets, these lucrative items now occupy as much space as meat, fish, fruit and vegetables put together. Or they offer an apparent helping hand to the beleaguered parent in the form of special children’s lines. There is a limit to how much you can charge the buying public for a potato, but when you “add value” to it by pulverising it and puffing it up with additives to create an “extruded snack”, then the sky is the limit.Large food retailers increasingly sideline ingredients for scratch cooking in their store layouts. Although it is now exactly 20 years since the publication of Maurice Hanssen’s landmark book E is for Additives, Stone Age food chemistry still pops up with regularity in everything from fruit pastilles to household name fizzy drinks. Hence families loading their trolleys with three distinct categories of food; adults’ food, pet food and children’s food.Stubborn parents who stand firm in the face of advertising-fuelled pleas for chewable cheese strings or the latest lunchbox gimmick must steer a lonely path through the aisles. Thanks to an unwholesome alliance between big food retailers, manufacturers and advertisers, aided and abetted by a series of supine governments that have not had the stomach to stand up to the food industry, our children’s health has been jeopardised almost beyond belief.Over the past two decades, parents have been spun the line that they no longer have the time or inclination to feed children from scratch from fresh ingredients and that children naturally need, and so must be given, different food from adults. They are allotted premium sales positions because they can fund attractive “buy one get one free” or “multibuy” offers that help to prop up the perception that supermarkets offer good value.

And they’re cheap.Aggressive promotion is underwritten by large, often global, food manufacturers with formidable marketing budgets. The report highlighted the “dirty dozen” most worrying items that routinely turn up in children’s food, including mechanically recovered meat, hydrogenated fat, artificial sweeteners, flavour enhancers, preservatives and colours It is an unsavoury list that makes frustrating reading. The risks to health of these ingredients have been well documented, and yet they still form the basis of a typical child’s diet.The assault begins in the supermarket: shelves brimming, in all their shiny, eye-grabbing splendour, with towering castles of fizzy drinks, flavoured crisps, cartoon-covered sacks of rubbery gums, special “children’s” (that means extra sweet and with more additives, yum yum) jellies. “We found that children as young as four are spending up to £30 a month on snacks and eating up to 80 additives per day,” says the founder of the organic baby food firm, Lizzie Vann. And it emerged that Nestl?nd McDonald’s were aiming promotional campaigns at youngsters in schools and hospitals.Early this year, the children’s food company Organix conducted extensive research into what our offspring eat, revealing a snacking culture of previously unthinkable dimensions. Researchers at Southampton University confirmed that food additives are causing behavioural problems. The tightknit maze of pig’s intestines tastes earthy and smells pissy as it should, and I would give my right arm for the rest of it.Less life-enriching are a cold, firm disc of foie gras glazed with a layer of duck jelly at a hefty £9.50, an insubstantial salad of little furls of cured duck breast and toasted pine nuts (£4); and a miniature pot au feu of chicken oysters and vegetables (£4.50) which is just too pretty for its own good.