Food - To get boys to eat veg, we should tell them eating carrots is good for sex

Once upon a time, "real men" learned they could eat quiche without their willies dropping off. Now, it seems, the struggle is to be fought all over again. Gender is always, in some way, an issue among children and adolescents.

Recent articles in the press have reported research discovering that schoolboys refuse to eat raw vegetables because they will be mocked as gay. Girlies eat salad; hence being properly macho means not eating salad. The vegetables in this case turn out to be raw carrots. If these are the supermarket carrots foisted on most of us, they will not taste of much at all. Who in their right mind wouldn't cook or at least sauce them first? Only an organically grown carrot pulled straight from the ground and eaten immediately gives any pleasure.

Why can't these poor boys be given delicious carottes rapees bathed in vinaigrette? In the silly rush to ban all fats, English people are denied salad dressing and don't know that cooking vegetables well usually involves olive oil. First, blanch your veg, then drain them, then toss them with olive oil, or a soupcon of butter, or a spoonful of cream. French adolescents, brought up to eat what the adults eat, eat their crudites, their creamed spinach and their butter-simmered cabbage without batting an eyelid. Their existential crises are more likely to come from being asked to do the washing-up than from being offered the same dishes as their sisters.

Vegetable lovers have been considered figures of fun ever since the disciples of Pythagoras became stock characters in comedy, caricatures certain to raise a snigger. Vegetarianism, as Colin Spencer points out in his magisterial The Heretic's Feast, has often been associated with dissidence and rebellion. When seen as allied to a moral critique of a culture, it appeared criminal, blasphemous, heretical: "Abstainers from meat came in all permutations and persuasions - from heretics, humanists and Christian fundamentalists (the Seventh Day Adventists) to the most radical Quakers, agnostics like Edward Carpenter, philosophers like Epicurus, founders of religion like John Wesley and even an emperor - Asoka." Preferring to munch greens gave you the status of an outsider.

So perhaps, for boys to like them, carrots need to acquire the same edgy, anti-hero status as cigarettes. We need a new James Dean, one willing to be photographed chewing sultrily on a root. Boys need to be reminded that cucumbers and aubergines are phallic symbols; that carrots make you see in the dark and are good for sex. No, I don't suppose it will work. Could David Beckham and Jamie Oliver be sent round schools to show how to eat carrots in a virile way? Is there one? And what about lesbians? Are their meat-eating predilections discernible?

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