Harold Pinter is one of our most celebrated playwrights (this observation was made before he won the Nobel Prize for literature). His plays delve into various places; most often these are deep, at any rate, deep-ish.

What gives him access, you might ask to these hidden-from-view areas?

The answer lies in the fact that Pinter imposes repeated silences on his characters: makes them speak through silence. What has this got to do with Nutrition? More perhaps than you would expect. Being one of today's most regularly discussed subjects, nutrition is assuredly a 'deep-ish' topic. It might not always have been an ideal candidate for 'speaking through silence', but it has become so by the way it has been treated.

When training to become a Naturopath, we students made up what essentially was a small commune (excellent training ground for social skills). As a third-year student one particularly fine October afternoon, I took myself off for a jog in the Braid Hills. My timing let me down somewhat, and when I got back to base the others had both started and finished their meal, main one of the day. Nothing but a plateful of potatoes remained. NEVER DID A PLATEFUL OF POTATOES TASTE SO ROYALLY - either before or since.

Perhaps the great Rabbie Burns summed it up best -

"Some hae meat and canna eat...
And some would eat that want it;
But we hae meat and we can eat
So let the Lord be thankit"

(That deserves to be followed by a Pinter silence)

I have just got enough breath left in me to gather that one of the numerous debates currently going on is about the relative merits of Omega 3 versus Omega 6 (fish versus tripe). For my money I would put down a motion that this particular debate should be given an extension. I reason that if we investigated Omega 1 to Infinity, A to Z, and keep in mind that Omega represents a symbol of mystery, we then might just be ideally placed to comprehend the subject.

For myself, I rest my case on a panful of spuds and a final quotation from a Canadian poet:

"The more we eat for pleasure
The less pleasure there is in eating"