Extreme Cuisine: Reorganise your kitchen so your relationship with food begins at the beginning - in the soil and grime. Haydn Shaughnessy encourages us to get closer to our food by remembering nature's role in making it.
Put a wild animal in a city apartment and, it's said, within days it will become depressed. Within weeks, obese. I doubt this experiment has ever been carried out because taking an animal from a natural environment and putting it into our own would be an act of cruelty.
Anyway, who wants a fox in the bathroom? The putative experiment though raises an important issue for our Prozac or Seroxat nation, disposed as it is to degenerative disease: What is natural behaviour and can we get close to it, can we rediscover how we are meant to relate to food?
The lazy, fashionable answer is that the act of eating together itself satisfies our fundamental food needs, so bring on the raspberry coulis avec crème fraiche, monsieur, and don't be bothering me again with your questions.
That communality argument misses important points. We can communally encourage each other to eat the wrong types of food. And consuming food is one small part of the relationship we have with it.
The kitchen though is, by design, separated from the dirt and grime of the garden and the process of growth, death and butchery. In place of space to deal with food, there's likely to be a human-sized freezer and fridge, and a microwave.
There is no larder with its cool, dark space for storing fermenting foods and pickles. No space for vegetables still dirty with soil. What used to be a scullery where vegetables and carcasses could be cleaned is now a utility room full of machines. There might be an Aga or range in the larger homes, ideal for raising dough overnight, but these are relatively rare.
Does any of this matter? It does when you are 15 kilos overweight or when you are one of the 300,000 people suffering from depression in Ireland.
It is possible to reorganise the kitchen so it fulfils the other parts of our fundamental needs than simply eating together. Those needs might be producing some of our own food, understanding soil, being influenced by the seasons, the weather, knowing enough to be confident about the effects of food, even understanding the influence of the moon.
The moon?
Well, I put that to a bunch of people who were drinking my wine recently, communally, and the reaction was astonishing.
My wife, a nurse, said, yes, in old folks' homes the full moon is a lock-down night. A wine-maker friend told me he never makes decisions on his vineyard on what he calls a root day, and that seems to be every third day of the lunar cycle.
I could go on but you get the point. Allowed to indulge their passion for nature and to explore their relationship with the planet, people love it.
But back to the kitchen. The kitchen can contain any number of novel devices: home grain mills, silos, porridge flakers, dehydrators, sprouting trays, double gauge juicers. The list is not endless but certainly fun. These machines are a way back to an intimate, tactile relationship with food.
An easy way of beginning the conversion of your kitchen to a healthier, more soulful environment can start with the kitchen garden and your own sprout factory.
When people talk about a kitchen garden they generally mean the garden outside, where they grow vegetables for cooking in the kitchen inside.
There is another kind of kitchen garden though and that's one where you grow things right there on the windowsill.
And there's a philosophy behind it - integrating the kitchen and the garden, breaking down the divide between nature and the home.
First the sprouts. Ann Wigmore was a revered Bostonian woman who developed whole food programmes around sprouting seeds, grains and pulses. Wigmore was also responsible for promoting what has become a health-foodie must-have - wheatgrass.
The benefits of sprouting, according to Wigmore, are that the growing process develops a wide range of amino acids (in other words, what we normally create with our digestive systems is done for us); and that we consume high levels of chlorophyll which help to build blood cells, reduce blood pressure and act as an energy source.
A similar benefits list applies to most sprouted food. It's possible to sprout chick peas, aduki beans, broccoli, wheat and other grains, alfalfa and many more. Over the years I've sprouted all these.
Most take just the addition of water. In some cases, it's necessary to keep them in the dark. Wheatgrass needs soil or a nutritious underlay. In the majority of cases, sprouting times are in the five-to-10 days range, and most need an overnight soaking to get them going.
Most sprouts should be cooked or juiced and it's wise to consult seed pack instructions carefully before using them. In the case of alfalfa sprouts they're great for adding to salads or for throwing into a bowl of soup.
So without turning a spade in the real garden, you can begin growing your own nutritious food. The next step though is to begin integrating the outdoor garden and the kitchen.
People are happier when they are around green plants and vegetables.
You could create your garden and organise your kitchen so there is little divide.
Use the area immediately outside a large window to grow flowering plants along with herbs, use window boxes for herbs and flowers, bridge the gap between the house and the garden with pots. These are familiar tactics for people who have already thought out how to extend the kitchen into the garden visually.
Visually the two are integrated but does the integration go any deeper? I find myself clearing the garden just like I might brush the kitchen floor when it's dirty.
At absurd times, in the middle of a game on the television, for example, I have to go pluck a few weeds that might have grown and I can now see in the corner of my eye.
Obsessive compulsive you might say. Clean and tidy, I say back. Just like a proper garden should be.
Ann Wigmore's The Sprouting Book is available from health food stores, the book shops and Amazon.