Every school used to have just one asthmatic, one diabetic and one epileptic, who were the object of a vast mythology: they'd usually be pointed out to new boys with something close to veneration, writes Kevin Myers
Mystery wafted from their every pore, yet the last thing anyone wanted was to see a diabetic injecting or an asthma-sufferer or an epileptic having a fit.
Our scout manual actually had some rather unusual advice for dealing with fits. An epileptic - it said - had most to fear from swallowing his tongue. So, it proposed that when a boy had a fit, several boys sit on him, while someone else got a hammer and nailed his tongue to the ground.All should then retire and lounge around at a safe distance, so that when the boy recovered, everyone could pretend nothing had happened. And of course, the lad lying there with his tongue pinioned to the floorboards would be convinced that this indeed was so.
If I remember correctly, and the school diabetic became unwell, I think we were encouraged to force-feed him sugar. If an asthmatic appeared close to death, the cure was probably to administer several pounds of dust nasally, aided by forcible artificial respiration if he appeared reluctant to inhale.
These, fortunately, remained hypothetical cures for what were in those days extremely rare conditions: moreover, happily for him, I never got near an epileptic with my hammer and nail - not, mind you, that I was itching to. Since then, however, medical science has made epilepsy a largely controlled and invisible affliction - but not so diabetes, and absolutely not so asthma. These are now epidemic, alongside all manner of other allergies. This is the Great Age of Food Intolerance.
Why? What has happened in the past half-century that so many people are made unwell by food? Diets are infinitely better today than they were in my childhood. Up until the 1970s, many people in Ireland subsisted solely on fried rashers, sausages, eggs, bread and butter and tea. Their annual intake of fruit consisted of glimpsing an apple at Hallowe'en. The occasional vegetables were confined to tinned peas and cabbage mercilessly boiled with soda into a tasteless, vitamin-free compost.
This really should have been the time when people were made unwell by their food, but it wasn't and they weren't. But by the time Chupi and Luke Sweetman came into this world in the 1980s, food allergies had arrived in full and fearful measure.
Rosita Sweetman, their mother, is convinced that many of these allergies are caused by residues of insecticides in our food. If that were simply the case, people of my age - the first of the insecticide generation - should be afflicted with allergies, and generally speaking we aren't. After all, we were the ones who would gaze in awe at the single school diabetic or the sole asthmatic as if they were about to mutate into hedgehogs any moment.
It's the subsequent generations which can't take wheat without experiencing involuntary colonic irrigation. And though I don't doubt that Rosita is right about the role of insecticide in poisoning people, there has to be more to it than just that. As it happens - and I dare say the Sweetman family won't exactly love me for saying this - the evil ubiquity of insecticides, and the need for agriculture to provide enough food for the billions of people on this planet, which organic methods can't do, provide a compelling argument for GM crops.
Chupi was permanently unwell when she was a teenager, and all medical inquiry proved fruitless. It was only after she took Chupi to see Patricia Quinn, the nutritionist, that Rosita began to realise the role of food, and poor water, in her daughter's illness.
Over time, the Quinns and the Sweetmans worked to assemble a complete list of recipes for people with allergies, and last year Chupi, aged 19, and her brother Luke, aged 16, became Ireland's youngest authors with their book What to eat when you can't anything (Newleaf).
The success of the book is confirmation of the chronic crisis in the relationship between food and the people who eat it: WTEWYCEA has already sold several thousand copies, is now in its third print run, and is to be published in New York later this year. This, now, from two Wicklow teenagers and a publishing house the size of a small shoe.
One hardly knows whether to applaud these youngsters or, in entirely laudable envy, throttle them to death with whole-wheat organic spaghetti; though there is the third option of drowning them in a vat of extra virgin olive oil - I think you'll find first cold pressing is best. Later pressings tend to leave the victim a garish chartreuse around the gills. Closed coffins, and so on. Very distressing for next of kin.
I have opted for a fourth choice. Minor dissent. Objection one: I do not agree with their recipe for Mexican scrambled eggs. They do not use butter. They must; otherwise they have eggs as fried by a horse which kept dropping the pan - those hooves: so clumsy - or an omelette that failed its Leaving Cert. Scrambled eggs should contain so much butter that the coronary artery comes bursting out of the door with its hands up, begging for mercy.
Objection two: They have a recipe for twice-baked biscotti. Biscotti - i.e., biscuits - already means twice-baked (from the Latin, bis coctus).
Dissent over. What to eat when you can't eat anything is a brilliant little cook-book in an era of poisonous foods. And remember those names, Chupi and Luke Sweetman: ones to watch.