The Duchess of Sussex’s appearance as a guest judge on MasterChef Australia was in many ways delightful, until we got to the segment about how her children Prince Archie, seven, and Princess Lilibet, five, enjoy yummy handpicked puddings.

Meghan told the contestants that she feels “very blessed” to have a large garden and lots of produce growing there. “If they say, 'Mama, can I have dessert?' We say, ‘If you can pick it, you can have it,’” she said.

It sets a lovely scene with the young royals overjoyed as they race around her Montecito garden in California collecting a few apples to cut into slices with perhaps even a few homegrown lemons to squeeze into freshly made lemonade. Absolutely, it’s a positive thing to reduce kids’ sugar intake by not pulling out the Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie. But hearing this latest dispatch from “magical” Montecito made me groan in despair. Mums like me who compare and despair end up feeling we’re not doing good enough.

The whole dreamy aesthetic of “being able to nurture through food”, as Meghan puts it, by cooking from scratch using homegrown produce – a theme which is also popular among mum influencers on the tradwife spectrum – puts so much pressure on struggling mums like me who battle to whack Omega 3 cod fish fingers in the oven after a hard day at work.

We have seen posts on Meghan’s Instagram of perfectly clean root vegetables devoid of mud she claims to have dug up pre-photo op. Who can forget that special homemade lemon cake using fresh citrus fruit plucked from trees in their garden at home for Archie’s fourth birthday in 2023, which Harry rushed back for after his father King Charles’s coronation?

No doubt Meghan grows other classic southern California garden staples like figs, as well as oranges, tomatoes, carrots, and leafy greens.

But the time and effort put into home cooking and landscaping the table at every meal is something most working mums can’t fit into their schedules. Yet Meghan continuously promotes it as an easy way to live and be, showcasing recipes with ingredients pulled straight from her garden in her Netflix lifestyle series With Love, Meghan. This includes home-harvested honey from her beehives as well as the home-grown fruits for her American Riviera Orchard strawberry and raspberry jams.

It is nothing short of idyllic – and wondrous, and deeply, deeply irritating to struggling mums like me. For starters, my children, Lola, 10, and Liberty, seven, don’t eat fruit unless it’s been magimixed and strained through a sieve so there are no seeds (often impossible, with little black strawberry seeds left in the goop).

I’m not proud of the fact that my children are fussy eaters, but the only sure way I can get them to get the right nutrients is via a liquid multi-vitamin. I’d love to make a slap-up meal and sit around a gorgeously dressed table to have some family time. But cooking from scratch and growing it is another level of pressure – especially when not everybody even has a garden.

A quick trip down the supermarket aisles before a playdate is more realistic than a dreamy spot of meandering around a vast meadow-like garden

I am lucky that I do, but it’s been destroyed by my senior golden retriever, Muggles, who digs up any grassy patches. I erected fences where my children and I channelled the spirit of Meghan and planted a few flowers and a tomato plant, but when I turned my back, Muggles had destroyed it faster than you could say “Apple pie”.

When you’re living the frazzle of real life, the last thing on your mind is your children trotting around picking wild fruit as joyously as if it is blackberry season every day. Life at my home is relentlessly telling them to get off screens and do their homework while running them a bath and trying to train them to load the dishwasher.

A quick trip down the supermarket aisles before a playdate is more realistic than a dreamy spot of meandering around a vast meadow-like garden. A treat in our house is a frozen chocolate digestive ice cream sandwich.

I did make a homemade pizza in the shape of a heart last week, but I didn’t have time to knead the dough for 15 minutes as instructed on the pizza mix packet. Luckily, it turned out okay, if a bit doughy.

That’s why this ongoing vogue for tradwifes, who foster perfect mum syndrome in the kitchen, is so damaging for most mums. These are unrealistic expectations in the imperfect lives that most mums lead and, jokes aside, they can trigger serious low self-esteem and mum guilt.

Because when we’re not meant to be snapping back to perfect size 10s, we’re meant to be making everything from scratch. Mum influencers like US-based Nara Smith, the South African-German model and mum of four who has 4.9 million followers, once made a cake that took seven hours to bake with homemade sprinkles. Like Meghan, she does this while looking perfectly turned out, not a nail or hair out of place.

Mums like Meghan, who foster perfect mum syndrome in the kitchen, set the rest of us up for unrealistic expectations as we live our imperfect lives

Her net worth is reported to be $6m —largely amassed from her TikTok earnings and influencing career. And I’m sure she means it when she says: “Cooking is my love language. I love taking care of people in that way”. But to me, it just sounds like she’s eating from the same word salad as Meghan.

Of course, no mum influencer has a truly perfect life cooking at home, but the social media content from the likes of Meghan and co rarely stray from the path of curated highlights and never show the whole picture. Where are the screaming kids? The estranged family? The messy feelings? The wanting-to-kick-the-bin feeling that we all experience sometimes?

The vibe of aesthetic calm and romanticised domesticity is obviously working for them, but it isn’t for the rest of us. The truth is it might be fun to watch on TikTok and Instagram as a form of curiosity, but it’s the hot mess of the daily hurly-burly that is important to embrace, not perfectly hand-picked puddings.