Taking pains to cook the child healthy food (7)
I believe the answer is:
spinach
'food' is the definition.
(spinach is a kind of food)
'taking pains to cook the child healthy' is the wordplay.
I cannot quite understand how this works, but
an anagram of 'pains' is 'spina' which is present in the answer.
'child' could be 'ch' (abbreviation for child) and 'ch' is found within the answer.
This accounts for all the letters.
This may be the basis of the clue (or it may be nonsense).
Can you help me to learn more?
(Other definitions for spinach that I've seen before include "food" , "Popeye's strength-giver" , "Leafy vegetable" , "Dark green vegetable" , "Popeye the Sailor's favourite vegetable" .)