Extreme Cuisine The start of the weekend usually means collecting the casual suit from the dry cleaners, tomato stain hopefully removed, the anticipation of being entertained by somebody else, the sweet smile of the host, the canapés sliding across the glass top of the table, a pink mayonnaise or, perish, raw crudités.
For those who are revising their eating plans, what might lie ahead is more the difficult business of ducking the social opprobrium heaped on the fussy. A grimace? A call for the BiSodol? The air kisses are behind you, the aperitif empty, you sit à table at the house of a friend you cannot afford to offend.
Tip number one: if your hosts are overly polite when you pass back the game pâté untouched: keep talking: If the Government is serious about healthy eating, you might say, looking Siobhan or Giselle straight in the eye, tell me: where are four million extra apples going to come from every day of the week? Take a breath, reach for the Braeburn and crunch.
If everyone in Europe decided to be healthy and eat just one apple a day, farmers would need to produce 164,000,000,000 apples a year. Add in a similar number of pears or other fruits and you have what even Brussels would have to call an impossible situation. Europe is not geared up to produce for healthy eating.
Europe is a laggard when it comes to food advice although ahead of America in eating fresh fruit. Strange though it may seem, Europeans already eat three apples a week each. But to eat seven means at least doubling production. In America, guidelines issued by the National Cancer Institute now say men should eat nine helpings of fruit and vegetables each day. Is American agriculture any more capable of turning out the necessary helpings?
Assume that men and women in America are eating three helpings of fruit each, daily. America is the world's second-largest apple producer behind China, and apples are the second most popular fruit in America, if you leave aside grapes which, of course, are more likely to end up being drunk rather than eaten and not even the wildest optimist would count wine in with their daily fruit quota.
America produces 40 billion apples a year (there are a stunning 7,500 varieties, 1,500 of them grown in the US) along with 160 billion oranges, the majority of which are squeezed into juice for global distribution.
These two fruits together dwarf production of all other fruits; but not all the production is utilisable; and a proportion goes into non-fresh products such as pies, juices, compotes and tins.
Edible fresh fruits produced? Some way short of the 300 billion fresh fruit items necessary for people to live healthily.
The good bluffer should start working out the best way to use this information to attain the twin aims of simultaneously avoiding saturated fats and faux pas.
Nine helpings of fruit and veg theoretically put the squeeze on meat but naturally you are eating at the house of a woman whose father owns an abattoir. You cast your eye around at a group of friends who are already guzzling the roast while you pick grape seeds from your teeth.
In Europe, you might chance the argument, there would be a substantial requirement for agricultural restructuring if people were to eat properly. European governments clearly believe we are in less need than those American fellers. Maybe there's no need whatsoever for change.
But go for it anyway.
An extra four helpings of fruit and veg each day would knock out at least one small meat portion from the average diet. One lost portion per day in Europe equals 18 million metric tonnes of four-legged food going out of the food chain each year. That equals 25 times annual Irish beef production or a fifth of the total Italian meat processing output. So your hostess is fuming.
But, you say In reality, European diners are again beginning to eat more red meat. The appetite for red meat is growing faster than that for fish and veg although both of these are also growing in popularity. This curiosity underlines a finding from the European Food Institute's studies on European diets that show, by and large, people who eat more fruit and veg in fact eat more of everything.
You still face the problem of how to avoid the main course: a succulent roast full of the wrong fats. Accompanied by salad of rocket and various stringy vegetables. You might be lucky and find fresh purple broccoli (powered by phytochemicals that go straight to the prostate gland and wrap it in a protective coating safe from malignancy) lying in a bowl of melted butter (full of bad cholesterol sadly). How can you pick out the good and leave behind the bad at the same time as securing a return invitation?
Picking up a banana and with a cursory reference to Europe's imminent harmonisation of banana tariffs, you go for the double bluff: "You do realise, that eating more fruit has one amazing by-product?"
And to the sound of gravy dripping back into the boat you reassure them: "It increases your appetite. Is that the organic pig's hoof? Lovely."
Haydn Shaughnessy is a journalist, part-time chef and critic of excess caution - he lives in West Cork.