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Having grown up in a household that made a point of its obsession with organic food before most people had even heard of the phenomenon, it would shock my mother, enemy of all confectionery and junk food, if I told her precisely what I ate during my teens and early twenties.
I remember how as a child I would sense her trepidation about any school meal or proposed stay at a friend's house. The way she would slyly steal information from a counterpart parent before consenting to any visit, or how she would embarrass me by opting me out of a school meal (oh how I coveted those custard drenched puddings!), instead sending me to school with strange sandwich concoctions of alfalfa and goat's cheese wrapped in a brown paper.
I remember too how she once coaxed me into betraying my grandmother, who used to sweeten my stays at her house with grotesquely gargantuan and radioactively-coloured illicit gobstoppers, by promising me that if I told the truth she would buy me a Superman outfit. My poor betrayed grandmother really did come in for quite a lecture, and that was the end of my secret sweet sessions after she told me, quite rightly, that if a gobstopper couldn't keep me quiet then nothing would.
It was around the time that I first started receiving pocket money that my mother had to accept that she was relinquishing some control. The problem was that, as most children would, I responded to years of food puritanism reactively, taking myself to sweet shops where I would cast my eyes and adoration on the most tastelessly packed and most obscenely coloured items before handing over my meagre income.
Her first inkling that I had been glutting myself on the foods she considered to be both evil and inedible came on my first post-pocket money visit to the dentist. In a matter of eight months I had gone from having unimpeachable teeth to ones that increasingly resembled the porous, discoloured and dissolving "nerds" I had long been delectating on my walks home from school. Fortunately for her, they were mostly only my baby teeth, and over the next few years I would become very careful, not to curb my habit, but to ensure that immaculate dental hygiene kept me clean of suspicion.
Then there was my student stint in India where I sampled all kinds of the stickiest and most unashamedly garish sweets, the kinds of things so thick with sugar that they could be used to epoxy a broken bridge. And then there was the cake I received from my "adopted" family on my twentieth birthday. It was in what they called "the western style", and represented a fusion of my two greatest interests: stadium rock and American football.
It was an icing sugar football pitch of practically bioluminescent green, offset by a rising red guitar, the colour of the cheapest, deadliest lipstick. Although I devoured it, partly out of politeness, partly out of a perverse desire to rebel against my mother, I suppose the two weeks of sickness that followed represented something of a turning point for me. Ever since then, my food ethics have evolved to converge with my mothers.
Which is why I share my mother's delight at recent news that the Food Standards Agency have called for a voluntary ban on six food colouring additives used in foods, cakes, soft drinks and other foodstuffs. The colours are sunset yellow (E110), quinoline yellow (E104), carmoisine (E122), allura red (E129) , tartrazine (E102) and ponceau 4R (E124).
Many scientists, including Professor Jim Davidson from the University of Southampton, have linked these additives with behaivoural problems such as hyperactivity and aggression as well as impaired IQ.
Professor Davidson comments, "We now have clear evidence that mixtures of certain food colours can adversely influence the behaviour of children.
"We know that hyperactivity in young child is a risk factor for, for example, later difficulties in school. Certainly it is associated with difficulties in learning to read.
"It is also associated with wider behavioural difficulties in middle childhood, such as conduct disorder.
"I feel that the effects we are seeing here are sufficiently great to represent a threat to health."
None of this will come as news to my mother who has long believed that consuming these additives "is tantamount to causing yourself personal injury". She has always been a formidable opponent of food companies who use E numbers, so is beginning to feel that she might be on the verge of significant and personal victory. She has even started giving me professional advice on the subject, saying, "You work for a no win, no fee organization, why aren't these manufacturers paying out the compensation claims of the youths whose lives they've wrecked? God knows, it might finally eradicate all E-numbers for good?"
I don't quite have the heart to tell her that even now my nickname among old school friends is E-number.
