AT HOME WITH THE WALTONS: Eat your heart out Billy Bunter.

Byline: Adam WALTON

GOD bless food! Is there anything in life more important than what we put in our mouths? I can't think of anything. Love, perhaps; but, in my experience, love needs food far more than food needs love.

I mean, there have been times in my life when I have been lovelorn and lonely but even during those barren, wilderness years I could rely on the joy of a good, homemade curry followed by a tub of Ben and Jerry's Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice cream. Yum yum! If I hadn't just had breakfast I'd be chopping those onions and pestling and mortaring a handful of unsuspecting cardamom seeds right now.

Food also has the advantage that it can compliment love. Without restaurants, most relationships would stall before they even got to the good bit; and, without wishing to put you off your tea, how much better that 'good bit' can be with a nice, unhealthy slathering of strawberries and cream!

It's food's infinite variety of colours and tastes that fuels my obsession.

I can't think of a greater sight - at least, a greater sight that I can write about in a family newspaper - than that of a well-stocked grocery aisle in a supermarket: the vast palette of hues, the diversity of shapes and the multitude of ingenious ways of packing things in cellophane.

Sometimes I just stand next to the watermelons and ogle without buying as much as a string bean. I suppose I'm a little odd like that.

Every bright shade and tempting texture is nature's way of screaming, 'Eat me! Eat me!', the idea being, of course, that we eat the pepper or aubergine, or strawberry or ugli fruit, and then, well, to be frank, poo the seeds out and start the entire cycle over again.

Quite what's going to happen when nature catches up with modern sewerage techniques is anyone's guess.

The same can't be said for the meat aisle, of course; but being vegetarian, with a tendency to inflict genocide upon fish-kind, I don't have to worry about that.

These words aren't merely the delirious cravings of a fatty. It's vitally important to have an interest in food when you have a young family. I can't imagine how people who don't have the time to cook manage to get their offspring to eat.

Without the magic and mystery of what goes on in the kitchen when daddy's wearing his French maid apron, I can't begin to think of how we would get our daughter to eat.

'What you doing, daddy?'

'I'm cooking your din-dins' What is it daddy?' 'Good question. Wait and see!' But the process piques her interest. She stands there and watches me chop the ends of my fingers off, and swear; and then burn things in the pan, and swear, and I can tell that she's intrigued as to what might, as it were, come out the other end.

Which makes two of us!

Ripping the lid off a tin, or puncturing the cellophane on a microwave meal, doesn't have the same mystique and, to my sanctimonious way of thinking, cheapens food. Give a child the sense that a spell has to be prepared and cast in order for them to eat, and they will fall in love with the magic of it all.

However, it's once you've made the food that the real hard work begins.

Getting a toddler to eat is, at the best of times, a task of Herculean proportions. Considering the speed at which they grow and the amount of energy they expend jumping and bouncing and accidentally bashing their daddies in the nether regions, it's astonishing how little they seem to want to eat.

No matter how much Ava actually eats, even when it stretches into double figures of platefuls, we're convinced that she's hardly had a mouthful.

I don't know a parent whose experience is any different. This food blindness must be a parental instinct to ensure that our children are forced to eat enough to survive.

Sometimes I wish it was as simple as it is in the wild: like the fledgling in the nest that screams for another big, fat juicy worm the second that it has swallowed the wriggler its overworked daddy blackbird has just yanked out of the ground and dragged to the nest.

I feel like that overworked daddy blackbird.

At least blackbirds don't have to stick the worm on a fork and then make choo! choo! train noises in the middle of busy restaurants in order to persuade their progeny to eat.

The books tell you not to do that - not to make every mouthful a game - otherwise the child will need to be entertained with every forkful.

So, as a parent paranoid that their six foot tall, thirteen stone toddler, is going to fade out of existence if she doesn't get that one, extra piece of overcooked pasta, you have to resort to other, dirtier, tactics.

All of humanities worst traits are learnt at the toddler's dinner table: blackmail, 'if you don't eat your asparagus, there will be no Scooby Doo this afternoon!'; bribery, 'if you eat your asparagus, you can watch Scooby Doo this afternoon!', and bullying, 'eat the flipping asparagus, or the cartoon dog gets it!'

We haven't had the same problem forcing Ava to eat her Easter eggs. The scientist who manages to make a chocolate bar or bag of crisps that is actually nutritious will deserve a shelf-full of Nobel prizes.

It's a subtle battle, but it's not something that we've let get in the way of our enjoyment of food. One look at my ever-expanding waistline, or the newspaper columns in which I mention it, will tell you that

CAPTION(S):

Food glorious food - nothing is as important in life, not even love as Billy Bunter will testify