Insider View - Diets

This month Lucy Madden’s ever-questioning eye lands on the thorny subject of Diets…some timely observations, just as we’re all trying to address the perennial problem of the tightening winter waistband...

A guest, of the non-paying variety, arrived here recently with her own lunch. This was not because we did not have an ample spread ready for her on the table, but because, as she announced, she couldn’t eat any of it since she was a ‘raw vegan’ and proceeded to spread out her wares onto an empty plate.

It all looked a bit dismal to me; limp lettuce, some sliced cucumber, a tomato or two with a sprinkling of something that resembled sawdust.

Had she not then told us that on this diet she was able to run 6 miles every day, I would have worried for her health, mentally and physically, but admittedly, she looked bright-eyed and frisky.

As one who, over the years, has encountered an unknown number of these ‘diets’, I have come to think of them as rather self-regarding and tedious.

It’s fine if you want to live off beetroot juice and green tea in the isolation of your own kitchen, but to foist them onto the rest of us and insist on sticking rigidly to your diet in all circumstances, is taking things too far. It’s against all the principles of hospitality, communality, sociability and common sense.

We have been asked to collaborate in various different food fads for guests, even with a family who requested that their food be cooked in saucepans solely for their own group.

It’s reasonable to ask for something that you are prepared to pay for and this was fine because the request was made in advance, enabling us to refuse the party in question, but is it reasonable to demand a diet of some complexity that is not on offer in the first place?

The Atkins, the Dukan, the Cabbage soup, the Every-other-day, the Maple syrup, last year’s Fast diet, and now the latest diet the Paleo are all bewilderingly contradictory and frankly mind-numbing. Their exponents, unless of the rich and polished variety who are going to look marvellous in any case, often do little to advertise the benefits of their food regimes.

Take, for example, the wizened looking couple in their early sixties who ran round Australia fuelled only by a handful of bananas. They look years older than their real ages.

I am surprising myself by this catalogue of spite because I believe passionately in the importance of diet. In our crazy society where half the population is obese and fat children have become the norm, why are our supermarkets three-quarters filled with the foods that make us so?

We are in danger of turning into a society that exists in Los Angeles, where body shapes are either whale-like or skeletal. The only anomaly I have found in having cancer treatment is that nobody involved in the care ever asked me what I eat and when questioned about this, the response was always that there was no hard evidence that diet had an influence. No hard evidence, perhaps, but the empirical evidence is surely overwhelming?

But there is healthy eating (although not everyone agrees about what this is) and there are diets that are at the extreme end of fanciful. Perhaps the daftest diet I have encountered is the ‘mindful’ Eat- what-you-like-but-only-when-you-really-feel-like-it, which I would have thought was more damaging to family life than one might care to contemplate.

However, with these contemporary fads come business opportunities. Where vegetarian and even vegan restaurants are now considered normal, might there not be a market for more evangelical eating? One could advertise, say, that one specialises in Dukan and South Beach, or that followers of raw food eating are especially welcome.

These places may already exist. I did stay at a hotel in Norfolk last summer where there was no breakfast menu but we were told we could have ‘whatever we liked’. This was a little curious and an invitation for some fun, but it was no surprise when a request for a kipper was turned down with a hopeful ‘you could have salmon instead.’

Anyone interested in nutrition cannot have failed to notice that there is one food group that is rarely excluded from any diet and this is vegetables.

Fruit may be suspect because of its fructose content and even wholewheat bread is viewed with suspicion because of its sugar content. Followers of the Paleo diet must beat themselves up if they eat a lentil curry, but something green and growing is recognised everywhere as being a jolly good thing.

This is why we as a country have such an advantage when it comes to food production and why this very green and pleasant land could be a haven for almost any extreme eater.

Together with her husband Johnny & family, Lucy Madden runs their magnificent 18th century mansion, Hilton Park, Clones, Co Monaghan as a country house which is open to private guests, groups, small weddings and conferences. The restored formal gardens are also open by arrangement. Lucy is a keen organic gardener and also a member of the Irish Food Writers Guild.