My wife once gave an interview to a glossy magazine about what she puts in our children's lunch boxes: "I always take care to use our home-made, wholemeal bread . . ." she said.
She always takes care to use our home-made wholemeal when she does the packed lunches, which is not the whole of the time. Usually the job falls to me, along with what I think of as the northern ritual of cleaning the boys' shoes every day, and other unskilled chores. Early on, I was tempted to put peanut butter sandwiches into the pack-ups because the boys love it, but this is north London and so peanuts are banned at their school. If one peanut was found on a classroom floor the emergency services would be called. Instead, I took to frying up some bacon and putting it between slices of white bread (with the wife remonstrating noisily in the background) because a cold bacon sandwich is what I myself would like to eat after a morning of double maths.
I was mindful, as I did this, that the most vigorous pensioner I know is an 86-year-old ex-train driver who has eaten a fried breakfast every day of his life. I agree with those commentators who say that the food debate has a class dimension, and my particular take on it is that it is iniquitous for the middle class to lecture the working class about healthy lifestyles while at the same time pumping out the additive-filled TV programmes that keep them rooted to their armchairs.
My ex-train driver may eat a high-fat breakfast, but he also spends most of the day tending his allotment and eating the produce. And so it was to be with my children: exercise and healthy food most of the time, but something seductive to get them eating amid all the distractions of a school lunch break . . . because the point about the bacon sandwich was that it was always eaten.
But then one of my sons accidentally brought home the wrong lunch box. It was the same type as his, but it belonged to one of his friends - somebody who lives in a very big house. Inside was a plastic carton containing the remains of a pasta dish that had featured fresh basil leaves; there were also the skins of four lychees and, by way of a healthy alternative to chocolate, a sesame seed bar. I thought of the other family, presumably at that very moment opening my son's lunch box, and seeing the debris left behind by the bacon sandwich, the caramel slice that usually accompanied it . . . and the empty chicken-crisp packet.
In a fit of guilt I cycled over the heath to the Rosslyn Delicatessen in Hampstead, where I purchased two prepared meals that approximated to the one I'd seen in the lunch box brought home in error.
The first dish I bought was penne with aubergines. It came in little plastic tubs, and the next day these were returned after school looking as if they had been licked clean.
For the next two weeks, my sons had deli food in their lunch boxes. I was trying to ensure that, should the lunch-box switcheroo occur again, the recipients of ours would be impressed. I imagined my son's lunch box being returned to me by a parent who said: "Your sons seem to have had stuffed vine leaves for lunch yesterday." "Yes," I would reply, "well, I was in a hurry, you know, so I just chucked in any old thing."
It became an expensive business, so I bought two Tupperware containers and began filling them with my own pasta concoctions. But having tasted deli food, my sons would not eat approximations of it. "Your cooking's all right hot," they said, "but we can't eat it cold."
They wouldn't even go back to bacon sandwiches. In fact, nothing now pleases them except food from a deli. I seem to have been caught in a snobbish snare of my own making.
