You can't beat the real thing

But the challenge for parents with children less rigid, is to make a packed lunch varied, healthy and appealing. Fruit is one of the big problems - easily peelable satsumas, a few grapes in tub are great, but apples get bruised, oranges are messy and have to be peeled, usually by a teacher who has better things to do.

Pandering to our anxiety about such things, a great range of fruit products have appeared on the market recently. The aim is to help us give our children fruit in an easy packable form.

The first type is just that, tiny packs of sultanas, carrots or grapes, all with the charm of the miniature and designed to appeal to young eyes as well as taste. Occasionally, supermarkets have packaged up small portions of small fruit with child appeal. Safeway used to do a particularly good range but it seems to have vanished off the shelves, only temporarily we hope.

The second is entirely novel. This is fruit you can play with - great long strings of apples and strawberries, chewy chunks of blackcurrants, and apples that fizz with lemon and lime flavour. Lemon and lime flavoured fizzy apple? Is this really what our children want? Probably, yes.

STRAIGHTFORWARD FRUIT:

though some are more straightforward than others

CAPTAIN ORGANIC Tropical Mix, 49p for 50g

Tasty mix of raisins, sultanas, dates, bananas and coconut, all organic, slightly sweetened, snazzily packaged. A hit.

SUNMAID RAISINS, £1.19

Pack of mini boxes - smaller than match boxes - of raisins, each one ideal for popping in a packed lunch. Neat, tasty, though not spectacularly so and probably lacking in lunch box cred.

SUNDORA

Jumbo Raisins, 125g for 79p

Pineapple Pieces, 50g for 39p

Tropical Mix, 125g for 99p

Prunes, 125g for 79p

Banana Chunks, 50g for 45p

With the exception of the pineapple, which had a lot of added sugar, these were fairly ordinary dried fruit, except that the prunes and raisins were partially rehydrated. This made them juicy and delicious. Excellent. Very moreish.

BUT would you want your small child eating over four ounces of raisins or dried fruit at one go in the middle of a school day? Could be drastic...

These were well packed in foil packs and described as being for lunch boxes - but you would have to split the packs and spread them over a few days, which really takes away half the point of buying them in the first place.

MARKS & SPENCER

Jumbo Raisins and Sultanas, 50g for 35p.

Nice and juicy and just the right size pack. An expensive way of buying dried fruit, but you can't have everything.

WHITWORTH FROOTZ, 40p for 40g

Raisins, cranberries and cherries. Interesting taste, very juicy, slightly sweetened - too much for adults but with great child-appeal. Makes fruit look funky. We also liked their guarantee ".....if it doesn't, please let us know and we will try to win you over for ever."

FUN FRUIT

LA FRUIT, 60p for 35g

"Delicious chewy chunks made from real fruits." Like little bits of flavoured brake block. Made of fruit puree (apricot 58 per cent) and juice plus acid and corn starch. Had a real sharpness about them but that may have been the ascorbic acid.

KELLOGGS FRUIT WINDERS 29p

These could have been specifically designed for children to be disgusting. Vividly coloured fruit-based strings that they unwind, dangle into/from their mouths, wrap round their fingers, chew. Almost impossible to eat in a civilised fashion. Some 57 per cent fruit, much of the rest is added sugar.

FRUIT BOWL FRUIT BARS, £1.35 for 100g

"Made with real juicy apricots and squeezed into bars." Some 48 per cent fruit, much of the rest is sugar.

FRUIT BOWL FRUIT FLAKES, 39p for 20g

"Contain three times its weight in fresh fruit." Plus a lot of sugar. Rubbery, but popular.

FRUIT BOWL REAL A PEEL, £1.49 for 90g

Another case where fruit meets sweets meets something to play with - long strips to unwind.

"Made with real juicy strawberries squashed into strips." Actually, not that many real juicy strawberries - less that 1g per roll. Only three per cent altogether, the rest of the fruit being mainly apple and pear. Some 33 per cent fruit in all.

SUNDORA FRUTTI MAX, 29p for 25g

47 per cent dried apple pieces. Some seven per cent fruit juices. Boosted with iron and vitamin C. Yes, and sucrose and dextrose and what ever it is that makes apple pieces fizz with lemon and lime.

To be fair to Sundora, at least they say that these snacks are best consumed at meal times and remind you to clean your teeth.

CONCLUSIONS

The straightforward dried fruit is excellent for lunch boxes. Nutritious and easy to eat - just be careful with some of those big packs for small people.

The other sugar added fruit snacks are another matter altogether. Yes, they're probably better for children than straightforward sticky sweets. But they are still closer to sweets than real fruit and probably a cunning plan to get round those school rules that ban sweets at playtime.

Even with the sometimes vast amounts of sugar they contain, they will, like sweets, do no great harm as an occasional treat. Their real danger is much greater. By giving our children a sugary, gimmicky snack and telling them it's fruit, we're sending them further away from real food. Most children already prefer fish fingers to fish, burgers to beef, tomato sauce to tomatoes, waffles to boiled potatoes. Once they've eaten fizzy lemon and lime apple pieces, or a bright green sweet toffee-like string, what chance of getting them to crunch into a plain old Granny Smith again?

Also, fruit is sweet enough, it doesn't need added sugar. More and more sugar is added to basic foods. Our children are getting fatter, succumbing earlier to heart disease. See the connection? A tub full of sweet crisp grapes, tiny cherry tomatoes, sticks of carrot and celery, a kiwi fruit with a spoon, to eat like a boiled egg - are all fun to eat but still proper food. Stick with them.