Kathleen MacMahon: From feeding my babies to making meatballs for my nephew, food is my favourite love language

Watching kids make and eat food is one of the most fulfilling pleasures of life – and a privilege we should all be lucky enough to enjoy

‘It has been my great privilege to always have food to give my family. I can imagine no greater pain than not.’ Picture: Getty

Of all the beautiful, ordinary things in life, the act of feeding a child may be the best of all. When my twins were born, I breastfed them one by one, too tired and perhaps also too prudish to bear the bovine nature of feeding two babies at a time.

I’d lie one of them on the couch beside me while I fed her sister. I remember their soft, jagged fingernails clawing my skin from ...