I tried six ways to cut my kid's food. Only one of them stuck.

The default, and the worst of the six for this specific job. A straight blade wants a sawing motion, and a sawing motion wants two hands and a stable board. I had one hand and a toddler leaning into my hip.

It is not that it cannot be done. It is that every piece takes three passes and the food slides around while you do it. Fine for onions. Miserable for a plate of pancakes when someone has already started yelling.

Shears were a genuine improvement and I used them for months. They are great on pizza, quesadillas, anything flat.

Two problems. They need both hands, which is the same problem as the knife. And they are hard to size consistently, so you end up with one piece that is fine and one that is too big, mid-air, over a bowl.

This one gets recommended constantly and I understand why. One hand, rolls fast, no sawing.

But a wheel scatters. Pieces shoot off the board, sizes come out wildly inconsistent depending on how hard you press, and it does nothing useful on anything with any thickness. Great on toast. Useless on chicken.

Restaurants, grandparents' houses, the park. A butter knife and a paper plate.

Every meal out turned into a negotiation with a server for something sharper, then a small apology for hacking away at a plate in public. This is not a tool problem so much as a fact of leaving the house, but it is the thing I most wanted a fix for.

Pre-cut fruit, pre-portioned pouches, the little trays. It does remove the task.

It also costs several times more per pound, the selection is narrow, and none of it helps at dinner when you are serving what everyone else is eating. The task came back within a week.