A small girl of my acquaintance insists on eating cornflakes without milk, flake by flake. It's a complicated thing, eating, but there are some wonderful books on the subject that might - just possibly - help.
Eat Your Peas, by Kes Gray and Nick Sharratt (Bodley Head, £9.99)
This will strike a chord in any desperate parent's heart. Daisy just won't eat her peas, even when Mum (check out Mum's necklace) offers her 92 chocolate factories, the moon, the stars, the sun - and a new fluffy pencil case. How to resolve the problem? There's a splendidly non-didactic ending and a strong bid by Daisy for a touch of common sense. It's also great fun as a counting book - double value for the money!
How to be a Practically Perfect Pig, by Nick Ward (Scholastic, £4.99)
This was a massive hit with every one of my testers. There's a neat touch of reverse psychology here: the two-, three- and four-year-olds suddenly turned amazingly virtuous when confronted with the anarchic goings on in the pig household, and claimed that they never gobbled down their food. (Time will tell if the effect is permanent.) The illustrations are stuffed with the tiny details that small readers love, and there's plenty to amuse adults too.
The Last Chocolate Biscuit, by Jamie Rix (Walker, £4.99)
It's rare to find a fresh new take on the vexed question of table manners, but Rix has managed it with this gloriously daft romp of a story along with an hilarious set of pictures by the irrepressible Arthur Robins. It's marvellous to read out loud, and it's also quite possible for a non-reader to study the pictures and make a pretty fair guess at everything that's going on, as Maurice does exactly as he is told and offers the last chocolate biscuit to everyone - even Maurice Monster in outer space. Fortunately space monsters have to mind their manners too, and Maurice gets home again ... to find a final twist in the tale. Hugely entertaining all round.
Wow! It's great being a duck, by Joan Rankin (Red Fox, £4.99)
This deals with the problem of being a dinner rather than eating one. Lillee is the smallest of all the ducks, and - typical of a youngest sibling - wants to be different. Off to the forest she goes, and at every excursion she is encouraged to eat a little more and grow a little fatter by Mr Furry-legs-Long-tail-Sharp-snout-Pink-tongue, until ... until what? Read it and find out. Like the illustrations, the words are both delicate and subtle ... there's a real Beatrix Potter quality to this story. "She glared at his furry legs. She studied his LONG TAIL. She observed his sharp snout." It's also beautifully designed ... a lovely, lovely book.
Growing Good, by Bernard Ashley (Bloomsbury, £4.99)
If you want to know where food comes from, try this. Illustrated in luminous glowing colours by Anne Wilson, it's a real celebration of a book - a factory is knocked down, and the wasteland is taken over by the neighbours to grow all kinds of fruit and veg and flowers, despite Mr Tott's hopes for a car park. The words alone sound good enough to eat: "Onion and okra and sorrel and spinach. Potatoes, pumpkin and poppies."
Goldilocks and the Three Bears, by Tony Mitton (Walker, £3.99)
The children's favourite has never looked as jolly as this. Mitton's catchy rhyming text rattles the story along, while Liz Million's bright and breezy illustrations bounce off the page. There are flip-flap pages for extra fun, and a dog and a duck to keep Goldilocks company. Even the tiniest of my testers adored every page and shouted "Again!" every time I finished the story ... and then ate every mouthful of her breakfast.
