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When I was 5 and my sister was 3, we went on a family trip, and she ate cheese off the floor at an airport. My mother, a germaphobe, got very upset. My sister, of course, got a stomach virus, and ever since then, I have an aversion to cheese.

I was a mother who worked ridiculously hard to keep catastrophe at bay. I didn't allow my kids to eat hamburgers for fear of E. coli. I didn't allow them to play with rope, string, balloons - anything that might strangle them. They had to bite grapes in half, avoid lollipops, eat only when I could watch them.

My mother fed me with a spoon until I was 6 years old.

Growing up in Texas, mum had five girls to feed on a very limited budget, so we'd end up eating the same thing until it was gone - some weeks it was carrots.

My mom died when I was 11 years old.

My grandmother died when my mother was just 11 years old, and consequently, my mother never learned how to cook particularly well.

I ate a bug once. It was flying around me. I was trying to get it away. It went right in my mouth. It was so gross!

When I was paralysed by polio at 13, I went into an isolation hospital and couldn't sit up, so I only took liquid food from spouted cups which the masked nurses would bring in and feed to me. I saw my parents only through glass; we couldn't touch.