Oh, gosh, YES. I know what you mean. I see trolleys filled with colourful sugary breakfast cereals and "healthy" granola bars with marshmallows and chocolate bits in??! and tins of spaghetti and bottles of soda or fruit punch - sandwich "meats" and little individual snack packs with biscuits and "cheese" that can be kept at room temperature for months?!

It's painful.

I was busting my backside at home, making my own relish and ketchup (out of rhubarb, it was AWFUL, only did it once) and mayonnaise, and trying to bake bread (edible but barely rose) without preservatives and it would be dry and awful by the next day ... spent a fortune on special foods without additives - it was a nightmare.

Then she'd go to school and trade her lunch, or go to a friend's house and have cookies and kool-aid and be spinning off the walls at home and at school.

The child psychiatrist who diagnosed her said she was the most hyperactive child he'd ever seen - and it was his specialty; he'd seen a fair few of them!

I was a single parent, had no support for this misery. And it was at a time when she was probably the only kid at school who couldn't eat "normal things" so that didn't help.