I have long held that traditional kids' menus in restaurants are almost without exception more enticing than the adult offerings. Kids' menus hold all the most delicious treats: fishfingers, chicken nuggets, mac 'n cheese.Kids' food never has weird aniseedy herbs in it, like dill, and kids' pizzas are models of classic simplicity. It sucks to have to order the salmon en croûte, when all you want is the spaghetti bolognaise off the kids' menu washed down with a Coke float.story_article_left1But children today seem to be a different breed. I met a two-year-old the other day who only eats olives and drinks sparkling water. What kind of a self-respecting child prefers Evian to Fanta Grape? I think I had my first sparkling water at the age of 29, and even now I just pretend to like olives because that's what adults do.The kids, they are a-changin'. And if you don't believe me, look no further than MasterChef Junior USA, currently airing on DStv channel 101. The show sees kids aged between eight and 13 competing to be crowned America's best "junior home cook", a phrase they repeat so often during the programme that you may start triggering.Gordon Ramsay is one of the judges, which is a sign of how badly his food empire must be going these days. Ramsay would host anything for cash. Fikile Mbalula should get him for the Sports Awards.Some of the children are so small that they literally cannot see over their blenders. None of them look old enough to be around kitchen knives, yet they wield them like tiny homicidal ninjas. They sometimes cut themselves, of course, but what do you expect when you're handing out industrial meat cleavers to children barely out of nappies? Seeing nine-year-olds whipping up crème anglaise and plating California rolls is utterly surreal. The kids have technical food vocabularies that radically outstrip my own. Ryan Kate, 11, folded her perfect homemade pasta in half in order to "break out the gluten". In one challenge, the children had to pick unlabelled ingredients like star anise and scotch bonnet from a pantry. I wouldn't recognise a scotch bonnet if it was sitting on a Scotsman's head.In the current season's first episode, the judges said they couldn't pick a winner, which is like when your parents tell you they don't have a favourite child but they actually do. But children do get sent home every week, and then they do what kids do best: cry. You have to be pretty dark to enjoy seeing kids weeping uncontrollably when they get eliminated. But in a world where pre-teens are confidently blanching Swiss chard, anything goes...