I have a clear recollection of my five-year-old self, perched on the edge of a hard chair, feet dangling high above the pavement outside a French cafe, carefully measuring out precious orangina, no more than an inch at a time, into a tall glass. I was trying to make it last longer. And it did: I also remember that particular feeling of smugness on seeing that my brother had finished and I had at least a third left. The early actions of a highly competitive pedant, you might say. But to question my childish attitude towards consumption never occurred to me, until I witnessed my two-and-a-half year old daughter employ the exact same approach this Christmas.

Her behaviour would not have been so striking to me, had it not been for her twin brother doing the exact opposite. Both relishing the heretofore unknown access to chocolate, they indulged in the opportunity in quite different ways. He ripped off the silver foil and crammed the chocolate into his mouth in its entirety, chewing rapidly. She, by contrast, slowly peeled off the wrapper, tiny bit by tiny bit, and then proceeded to lick and nibble at the chocolate for another ten minutes, despite our objections to the impending melted mess.

Most interestingly perhaps, aside from the unfathomable proliferation of chocolate smears in places those little hands without some feat of magic could not possibly reach, was that the incident threw up the suggestion that such behaviour is more intuitive than learned. It would be easy to assume on seeing a small child shovelling in food, without pausing to catch breath, that this was something the child had observed in their parents and therefore deemed an acceptable, yes normal, way to eat. Not so, it seems. Neither of our children has been told how to eat a chocolate, nor more broadly instructed in any particular way about the speed at which they should eat any other food. Their experiences of food to date have been pretty much identical – they eat the same meals with us at the same time. You would think, therefore, that their table (and chocolate) manners would be similar rather than so divergent. After the chocolate experiment, there appears to be something more fundamental going on.

Of course, an additional ‘learned’ explanation may lie in the fact that he tends to display more anxiety that she, his darling sister, might take things off him (particularly his most prized possessions – like chocolate) if he does not protect them from her. We have other examples of this: hiding miniature cars under the bookshelf when (he thinks) no one else is looking, stowing little plastic men in his pockets, consuming four large chunks of pear in close succession, when the threat of another little pair of hands was hovering over his plate. She tends to be more relaxed about these things. But I don’t think he felt threatened this time. She had her own chocolate, and we were there to police the situation.

I actually think he, though by no means a greedy child, just enjoys eating quickly, and she likes to savour whatever she might have. With no implicit merit to attribute to either method, I suppose we should just let them get on and revel in it, whilst we clear up the chocolate stains.