Fed up with the lot

SCENE 1: It's half past five, and Deborah is winding up another busy working day. She phones home to see if everything is going according to plan.

Tonight, her 18 year old daughter is in charge of feeding her three younger brothers, a job that consists of cooking the pasta, opening ajar of Dolmio sauce, and combining the two.

Five tortured minutes later, she hangs up wearily. "They're fighting again. And Matthew got on to remind me he hates spaghetti." Oh yes, this sounds familiar.

SCENE 2: It's half past five and Caroline decides to take pity on her daughter and pick her up after sports at school.

"What's for dinner?" asks the weary but insufficiently grateful child. "Rashers, sausages, and chips?" she wails, adding sarcastically, "Well that's healthy."

Is it possible to get it right? Is there some secret recipe for getting the right recipes for feeding your family? For about domestic cooking, only one thing is certain: you cannot, as Abe Lincoln used to say, please all the people all the time.

If your older children's tastebuds have matured to the point where they now enjoy a good old fashioned meat and two veg, you can be sure the tot will turn up her nose at anything that doesn't resemble fast food. (Many a mother has concluded that the kids might even eat vegetables if she donned a paper hat and served the food in little boxes.)

Or, just when you think you have consensus, one decides he's a vegetarian. Or won't eat food she's scared of, like Caroline's daughter who won't touch chicken because she hates birds. Or won't eat food they love; every home has gone through its poor little lamb phase.

This is a problem facing all parents, but it's compounded in a family where both parents work outside the home. Guilt enters the equation as you imagine that if only you had the time to whizz up tasty, homemade fare, you wouldn't have this problem.

Not so. Ita Saul, principal paediatric dietitian at a Dublin's children hospital, gets anxious requests about feeding children from a wide range of parents, and it's reassuring to learn from her that childish food faddism is widespread.

She is very practical in her approach: while on the one hand advising parents to avoid getting locked into battles over food, she says a family should have a core agreement on the kind of meals they want. "You can't be chasing your tail making five different meals for five different people.

On the other hand, she recognises that frequently it's impossible to get everyone to eat the same meal. The answer lies in the food pyramid: you need to get yourself a chart of this, which divides food up into the four main groups from bread/potatoes/cereals, fruit/ vegetables, milk/ cheese/yogurt through to meat/fish and their alternatives. It will show you at a glance how much of each group children and adults need every day, and different ways of getting them.

"For example, if a small child won't eat meat, beans are a very easy way of giving them protein. And we'd often have children here who won't eat vegetables, but who will eat fruit."

SHE CONFIRMS what parents know: that many, many children up to the age of eight or nine eat a very restricted range of foods, and go through long phases of seeming to eat just one or two favourite foods.

She confirms, too, that many small children survive virtually on cereal alone for years. She doesn't even frown on the "junk" cereals, many of which are fortified with iron and vitamins. "Cereal gives them the starch they need, plus they get the food value of milk; if you make sure they drink some pure fruit juice too, they will get the vitamins they need."

So is it okay to let a child who won't eat the family meal have a bowl of cereal as an alternative? Basically, her answer is "Yes."

Teenagers are a different proposition: parents worry that they will run out of food to satisfy teenage boys, and that teenage girls won't get enough iron if - like many families these days you've been cutting down (or out) on red meat.

"Teenage boys will eat to appetite," she laughs. "They eat bread and jam and toasted cheese sandwiches and cereal until it comes out their ears, and that's fine."

But it is important to make sure teenage girls get enough iron, she says, and if they're not eating red meat "you need to make sure they eat whole grain breads and cereals, as well as white meat and fish, egg yolk, and fruit juice or fruits with vitamin C - which is necessary to extract the iron out of these other foods."

She thinks the wide range of foods available to us nowadays - from pizzas to stir fries to pastas (with homemade or ready made sauces) - is something to celebrate, offering families a much wider range of healthy foods to choose from than they had in the past. "Even though I'm sure many parents find the choice mind boggling," she admits.

Food writer Georgina Campbell also believes that children who have been fed mashed up versions of the basics as toddlers will come back to healthy eating eventually - probably by the time they're 20. In the meantime, you just have to try to balance children's taste for junk with healthy foods, even if brown scones "come back all blue mouldy in the lunchbox".

She has some sound advice for working parents who long to feed the family old fashioned stews, meals that combine all the foods you need. Buy a slow cooker. She kept her family of husband and three sons, who all like traditional cooking, fed well for years with this aid.

You need to give yourself about 15 minutes in the morning to chop food - meat and root veg such as carrots or parsnips - and put it in the slow cooker. It will slowly cook over the next eight hours. At the end of the day, you need another 15 minutes to cook some green vegetables and thicken the liquid - and there's your hearty family meal.

Campbell, whose latest cookery book, The Best of Irish Breads and Baking, has just been published (Wolfhound, £9.99), even cooks porridge overnight in her slow cooker and you can't get much more traditional than that.