"The kids won't eat it"

If you're cooking for children, the app has an extra argument, which is that the app knows what they'll eat and the pan doesn't. You make a plain plate and half of it comes back and there's a row, and the pizza doesn't come back and there isn't. Lavelle's interviewees named family food preferences as one of the things that stopped them cooking from basic ingredients, and anyone who's fed a six-year-old knows why.

I don't have a study for what follows and I'm not going to pretend I do, so take it as one way of thinking about it. The plain plate has a feature the takeaway doesn't, which is that its parts come apart. Pasta, sauce, cheese, peas. The child who won't eat the sauce can have the pasta and the cheese. The child who won't eat anything touching anything else can have the parts in a row. A takeaway is one thing, and the child either eats it or doesn't. A plain plate is four things and a child can usually be found who'll eat two of them.

The other feature is that it's the same six things, and the same six things are what children come to eat. A child who sees pasta with tomatoes on Tuesday every week starts to eat pasta with tomatoes, not because you argued but because it's Tuesday. Nothing in a takeaway rotation is ever the same twice, so nothing ever becomes familiar.

And the row, if I can say so, isn't about the food. It's at seven, when everyone's hungry and the question's unanswered and the answer's been argued about. Decide the six things once, with the children in the room if they're old enough to have a say, and the argument moves from seven o'clock on Tuesday to a Sunday afternoon, where it's a conversation. What's on the plate on Tuesday is then just what's on the plate on Tuesday.