I can't stand the secrecy any longer...

[motherinferior]

[deep breath, here goes]

MY CHILDREN EAT CRISPS. Full-fat, salty, additive-laden, evil-as-you-can-get crisps, and crisp-related pseudo-food snackettes. In huge quantities, at every possible opportunity. They also, since you ask (well, you didn't, but I'm on a roll, OK) eat chicken nuggets and similar pseudo-foods, with every appearance of enjoyment, and sometimes go to MacDonalds. Most of this they do not do with me, but in the company of their childminder (who also provides them with excellent food most of the time) while I am at home working quite possibly on a pious article about the Evils of Pseudo-foods. They also eat fruit - in vast quantities - and veg, as it happens, and other trappings of the liberalpinko's culinary lifestyle, but YES THEY EAT JUNK and I am sorry to admit THEY LIKE IT.

Their dad is also a big crisp fan.

And I quite like crisps too, although I prefer posh ones which aren't quite so in-your-face crisply.

I am not looking for absolution, but felt a need to confess given that I seem to be the only person on Mumsnet who permits such indulgences. And now I'm going to slink away (not flounce, slink), to collect them and face the full impact of my Shame.

Oh thank God!

Dd's fortnightly trip to Macdonalds has been my guilty secret up until now. If I had known everybody was at it I would have been so much more relaxed...

DD found an newly packet of salt and black pepper kettle chips on the kitchen table during new years day and was seen under the kitchen table, an hour later, with an empty packet.... Well done girl - my current fave's are sweet chili, but ds's godfather fed him salt and pepper crisps when he was 9 months old...

I tend to con my 4 year old into eating 'healthy' food by telling him carrots make you see in the dark etc. He adds his own equations such as potatoes help you see in the daylight! I got him to eat sweetcorn after telling him it would keep his hair lovely and blond (he is v.v. blond), although he got into trouble the next day at nursery by trying to persuade another child with dark hair to eat sweetcorn for the same reason. The child reasonably enough didn't want blond hair!

That's about it on the veg register for him though, apart from carrots. How do you stop them eating crap unless you lock them in a darkened room till they're 5? If Chicken Nuggets is on the menu that is what they will automatically go for.

He also refuses fizzy drinks on the grounds that they rot your teeth although this argument is wearing thin when it comes to sweets... don't think this unquestioning indoctrination will continue to be effective now he has started school.

BTW I never tell him chocolate is bad, because I am addicted to the stuff and could not do without it in the house!

we eat crisps too, but only occasionally...and dd1 has been to McD's twice

My DD has salt & vinegar crisps in her packed lunch evey day (she loves them)

My favourite is Walkers cheese and onion. Her brothers love chicken and mushroom pot noodles when they come home for lunch -their school is closer.

Bet you didn't expect me to be so irresponsible did you?

What a comforting thread. We have taken ds to McDonalds twice now on his pressing insistence, and Burger King twice too. Won't have cheese strings, nuggets or those yogurts in pouches in the house though.
And yes, we eat crisps and chocolate on a regular basis, although like Twig, now I think of it, we don't buy him sweets as such.
Thankyou MI, purveyor of excessively chocolatey and yummy treats all over London

at mears.

DS turned down some lovely walkers bacon crisps the other day (just one as a guilt appeasement for crisp munching monster mother of badness) but loves brussel sprouts and broccoli (yuck yuck yuck). I think he's trying to mess with my mind.

DD isn't allowed crisps at all, but not for any health reasons, I just find them too gross (the smell, the grease) but she had a school assessment yeaterday where they asked what she'd had for breakfast. She gave the honest answer of "2 big chocolate chip cookies, hot chocolate and some haribo" and proved how malnourished she was by asking for a second bowl of porrige at snack time.

have so far balked at cheesestrings, but do have "cow cheese" triangles chez bundle...

Mears! I'm gobsmacked!!!!

DS1 has just started school and I had a conversation in the playground yesterday with another mum who I have known a long time. It was DS's first packed lunch day and I told them that I had made him promise to eat his ham sandwiches and banana before he ate his hula hoops and Penguin. Cue horrified faces from my friend and other mums, "oooh I would never put chocolate in his lunch box!" I had to restrain myself from knocking her teeth out. As a result of demonising anything like this, I bet her choc-and-crisp starved little boy will become a lardy obsessive when older!

Can I ask what the big deal about chicken nuggets is? Sure, they're not the world's healthiest food, but they can't be all that bad, especially if they're baked not fried. Better than crisps I would have thought.

I think it depends on the make, personally. The ones we have are just chunks of chicken breast covered in breadcrumbs which seems Ok to me, but lots of them are made from mechanically recovered meat. There was a documentary on here a few years ago that showed a factory making them for McDs (I think) and they were sweeping up the bits off the floor and putting them back into the mixture. Yuck.

oh and the same fo overn chips
dh is my witness

Anchovy posted a home made oven chip recipe which has transformed my life. Hardly any fat, too.

we do homemade oven chips (I mean, they're just long thin roast potatoes really), and home made chicken nuggets. Re chicken nuggets - I'm very wary of them but I have a bit of a thing about chicken generally - most bog-standard chicken breast has water injected into it and a lot of it has had growth-boosting hormones, and many are reared in poor conditions - so I shold imagine that chicken nuggets are mostly made from this stuff. Afraid chicken is something I spend heinous amounts of money on getting the full-blown, organic free-range stuff. Chop it into bits, dip in beaten egg and breadcrumbs, stick in the oven. The only problem is that they'r really nice and I end up having two teas if I make them for dds.

I should recoil in horror at the meat scraped off the floor bit for chicken nuggets... but don't we all eat a bit of processed food at some stage? (hence we have probably ingested all sorts of nasties at some stage or other)...
..and eat in restaurants and cafes which aren't always as scrupulous as you might like to think despite food hygiene regs.

A good friend of mine had a lighthearted tease of me today because I had let my 2.6 year old drink some diet coke - well strike me down with a lightning bolt! She isn't going to spontaneously combust because of it. And for the record I don't think diet coke is a good thing - but perhaps now and then when I am drinking one and she wants a sip or two - where's the harm....

I agree HMC. I don't see the harm with having "bad" things occasionally. DD loves tea so I let her have a few sips occasionally. It would be different if I gave her a whole beaker full every day. She also helped herself to dsd's Macdonald's coke once. Her face was a picture when she realised it was fizzy!

Talk abut peer pressure. You lot are all making me feel bad about the things i don't let DS have . He never has fizzy drinks (partly because he is a wuss about the bubbles). He doesn't know what McDonalds is. I virtually never buy him crisps.

I'm worried he's going to become a "lardy obsessive" like Wordsmith's friend's son. But he does eat crisps. He's got 3 birthday parties in January - crisps on the menu at all of them. He's still eating Christmas chocolate on a daily basis. The problem with crisps to me is the size of a packet putting him off his meal. Also his favourite vice is an Asda meal deal curry. So do I qualify?

Crisps and chocolates Bozza? ummmmmm let me think....

You're in!

LOL HMC but the crisps are at other people's expense. Still come February I'll be spending a lot of money to fill everyone else's kids with junk at DS's party.