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24 September 1998 Edition

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Food for thought

By Mary Nelis

Have you noticed that those individuals historically described as revolutionaries, were all thin and emaciated? No doubt their appearance was the result of long years of struggle and sacrifice, bread and water regimes in prison and cold tea and stale buns at cumann meetings.

And so it was that in search of the revolutionary figure, I found myself standing in a queue of women, no doubt inspired by the same missionary goal as myself, in the local Parish Hall.

I duly signed on, paid my £7, concessionary rate for senior revolutionaries, and moved towards that wonder of the technological age, the electronic scale.

I weighed in at the ``round'' figure of 11 stone. I had taken my first step to creating the image of the female in struggle. I joined Weight Watchers.

Being a revolutionary is hard work, but I was inspired by the vision that a few months down the road I would look like someone just emerging from the mountains, having spent months eating grass and listening to tapes on ``how to make the Assembly more palatable''.

Little did I know that fateful night when I signed on, that my commitment to struggle would soon be tested in the most dreadful manner imaginable. For, in the following two weeks, I received no less than five dinner invitations, two luncheon engagements and meetings which ended in what is described in politically correct language as ``finger buffets''.

Yes, you guessed it, local councillors get paid in food. However, as we councillors have a duty to our constituents, I convinced myself that the way forward as a revolutionary was to engage the enemy across the dinner table.

And so it came to pass that I found myself sitting at a table which reflected the colour, gender, class and political diversity of what passes for political correctness in today's society.

The guests at this dinner table normally ate their way through five courses without a revolutionary thought in their heads. The food, cooked and served by local women, was wholesome and wonderfully presented.

For readers not fully committed to the struggle for a revolutionary figure, such situations can be the first indication of counter-revolutionary tendencies. However Weight Watchers have devised a marvellous system for keeping us on the slim and thin.

Each piece of food has a point value and new recruits are assigned a number of points to eat daily. I found that it needed full political consciousness to engage the enemy in conversation about the peace process, Trimble's flirtation with Seamus Mallon, the Clinton saga, why Du Pont located in Derry, the strong Sterling, and count my food points at the same time.

But we are a people of struggle and so for four nights I thought of comrades and freedom, and the shape of things to come, not least my own, as I watched thousands of tons of food disappear into hundreds of mouths.

It was at this point that I realised that focusing on counting points for eating can become just as anti-revolutionary as eating too much. Gluttony and girth are two separate matters. It occurred to me that the mode of life which focuses exclusively on food as something to be consumed, or an expression of who we are or how different or better we are because we ``know'' is not the way forward for a movement whose culture is centered on connecting rather than consuming.

I began to understand that the proof of the pudding, which at the last dinner was five points, was not in the size of the body but in the shape of the revolutionary soul.

And so I have concluded that Weight Watchers may not have ``pointed'' me to a revolutionary size 10 figure but it sure concentrated my political awareness on the erotic and exotic range of food available to us in Western society and grown by people who are thin because they go hungry so that we can have mangoes from Haiti, gourmet foods from Ethiopia and Tanzania etc.

Food today is power, privilege and probematic. We have lost the ability to enjoy it for its own sake.  

An Phoblacht
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Dublin 1
Ireland