My two boys are hungry ALL the time!

Polly Williams has two young sons, aged six and 10, who eat all the time - they have food on the brain and she's finding it hard to keep up with their growing appetites. It happens so quickly. One minute your baby boy is reluctantly sucking pureed peas off a plastic spoon, the next he's flinging back the fridge door, demolishing its contents, then gnawing his way through the kitchen cupboards. It's like a picky lapdog growing into a ravenous great dane.No wonder boys are expensive. A recent survey by Halifax looking at the cost of bringing up children shows that it costs over £12,000 more to raise a boy to the age of 11 than a girl: £105,963 for boys; £93,016 for girls. The bank puts this down to extra sports kits, even wear and tear of furniture caused by household rampaging. They don't mention the obvious: as boys get older, bigger, hungrier, the food bill becomes ever more bloated and monstrous, a drip feed of calories, carbs and cash.There are increasing numbers of impoverished children in this country who don't get enough food, whose one good meal a day is a free school meal. It has to be said that my boys - Oscar, 10, and Jago, six - are not those children. They eat constantly. Twice as much as their sister, Alice, who nonetheless has a healthy appetite. More than me, ditto. There is not a finger of fat on either boy. They are ravenous when they wake up, ravenous before they go to bed. Jago needs two bowls of porridge before school. Food is central to their lives, hotly anticipated, wolfed down, fought over. Cake has to be carefully divided lest marginally differing portion sizes are identified, and war is declared. Their stomachs are intrinsically linked to their mood: when hungry, my daughter can usually be distracted by a biscuit, my boys are more likely to crash like malfunctioning computers, unfit for homework or civilised conversation, and whack each other over the head. While they do put out a lot of energy playing sport, I'm not sure how much difference this makes given that they're hungry while watching telly too. Food is never far from their minds, usually mentioned two minutes into a car journey, 20 minutes after the last meal and every time we pass a corner shop. Sometimes they eat so much that I worry there's something wrong. Then, a few weeks later, I discover they've grown two inches.Generally, boys do need more calories than girls, especially as they get older. But not as much as their appetites might suggest. The NHS guidelines are that boys at 13 need about 200 calories more, which is only three slices of toast. But at 18, it's more like 700. Other sources suggest that teenage boys need to eat much more than that, especially active, sporty ones with enormous feet. Presumably that's why so many teenage boys feel like they're constantly at the end of a fast day on the 5:2 diet. They've got food on the brain.A magic porridge pot would be the perfect solution. Like all my friends with boys, I have a hard time trying to keep up with demand. As my boys are also both allergic to nuts, buying pre-packaged food is problematic - few things are guaranteed nut free - so I make a lot from scratch. Even if you enjoy cooking, and luckily I do, it can still be dispiriting: meal after meal, snack after snack, the smells, the steam, the dirty pans, the thought of repeating it all every day, in ever increasing volumes, until ... oh God, when?The approach has to be military. Time-tested techniques must be gleaned from the savvy of the sisterhood, in my case my mother (three boys), mother-in-law (four boys) and sister-in-law (four boys). My pans have got bigger. I cook ahead. I boil up bones. I bulk out meat dishes with beans. I add oats to muesli. I make soups and stews in great steaming, satisfying vats. I throw them toast.Naturally undomesticated, I'm nonetheless now forced to plan the weekly meals. Rather than one supermarket order a week, I do two, bookending the working week. (The days of buying expensive organic delicacies at the farmer's market, one precious goat's cheese round at a time, are laughably over.) I've also started making and freezing things such as lasagne and flapjack in foil trays - dedicating precious Saturday mornings to doing this - imagining the horror of my 25-year-old self, but desperate for ways to ease things up mid-week when I'm trying to work and the boys start circling.I'm haunted and baffled by the fact that we can easily get through 20 pints of milk a week. I don't understand how anyone can eat four bananas in a row. I cannot imagine what it's going to be like when my boys become teenagers."Oh, it's a nightmare," my sister-in-law reassures. "The food required is absolutely endless." Boys need four solid meals a day, a working mother of three boys tells me. "Three doesn't cut it. They eat after school and then they eat again with us in the evening."Another explains that her 14-year-old boy is already 6ft 1in - like many of his friends, all of whom pile back to her kitchen after school - and has an appetite to match his height. "Two omelettes for breakfast, Weetabix, toast. Any loaf of bread goes in minutes. And a cooked school lunch is essential."A friend's two young teenage boys have ingeniously and rather sweetly started to pool their pocket money so they can hit the three-for-two deals at the supermarket's biscuit aisle to stave off hunger pangs. Everyone says boys have hollow legs. You can't throw Gwyneth Paltrow's cookbook and a few sprouting seeds at them and be done with it. Feeding boys is about quantity, calories, protein and carbs.So what do the parents of boys on Twitter suggest? "A giant fruit bowl, an electrified fence around the crisp cupboard", tons of bread, potatoes, cereal, milkshakes, eggy bread, paella, roast vegetables, spag bol, sausages, curries, huge amounts of cheese, pints and pints of milk, and it's a good idea to teach them to bake. The more they can make for themselves, the less you have to do. What would we tell the mother of a new baby boy? Boys are wonderful. Boys eat a lot. You're going to need a bigger fridge.• Follow Polly on Twitter, @pollywilliams
Picture: Does it cost £12,000 more to bring up a boy than a girl because they eat more? Photograph: Jean Michel Foujols/Corbis