Meal Stress

I have a confession to make...my MCADD kid has terrible table manners!  I blame myself.  Really, it's all my fault.  When my older (non-affected) son was this age and he would start throwing food off his plate or dropping his plate on the floor, I would just take it away.  If he's playing with his food, he must not be hungry enough to eat it.  Wipe off the child and set him loose to play.  Issue closed.  Food throwing situation solved in relatively short order.

With LB, I haven't been able to do that.  Even if he's throwing his food or throwing his plate, cup, fork, etc., I haven't been simply wiping him up and setting him loose.  I've been attempting to have him continue his meal because after all, he needs to eat, right?  So, meal after meal, we are enduring chunks of food flying past our heads and utensils landing on our plates and oodles and oodles of food wasted on the dog (who may very well need to be put on a diet soon). 

For the longest time, we tried to ignore it thinking no reaction from us would make him think food throwing wasn't much fun.  Or we would take his plate away for a minute, remind him that we don't throw our food and then give it back to him only to have him go right back to throwing.  Needless to say, mealtimes have gotten very stressful.  It's a dangerous spiral -- he throws food because he isn't hungry, we want him to eat any morsel of food possible so we let him continue to throw food and then we get stressed that he's not eating the food, he's only throwing the food and we stack more food onto his plate in an attempt to get him to eat something, anything and he just keeps throwing food anyway.   

Thankfully, if he doesn't eat a good dinner, we always have the bedtime snack to fall back on, but even then it's a matter of chasing him down and popping graham crackers in his mouth anytime he slips out of perpetual motion. He's constantly busy zooming through the house and really can't stop and be bothered to sit down and concentrate on eating.

We know that he's healthy and developing appropriately, so he must be getting plenty of calories, but this mealtime madness thing is really getting hard (and rather embarrassing when we eat in places other than our own home). Does anyone have any good tips for getting through it?  We are all ears!