Avoiding wraps, potato wedges and soggy sandwiches turns lunchtime into a battle against convenience. Haydn Shaughnessy reports
If you believe that we, as a society, are threatened by morbid obesity then lunch might be a large part of the problem. At no other time of the day is it so routine to snatch whatever's available and get on with more important things, like work.
Of course, a generous helping of scepticism is needed when it comes to assessing the dangers of obesity.
The market for diet-related products is now $40 billion annually in the US alone.
Business Access, the organiser of a global anti-obesity conference scheduled for September in Washington, boasts that the pharmaceutical industry is about to witness the "biggest windfall in modern pharmaceuticals".
The statistics are difficult to digest: "Within 10 years the market for obesity drugs is projected to be $50 billion, more than outselling today's top three 'blockbuster' categories - cholesterol-lowering, anti-depressants and heartburn relief - combined."
The dollar signs highlight the need for a soupcon of caution.
Add in a new ingredient - a recent report, again from the US, from scientists at various universities but including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that being overweight is potentially health beneficial.
Reviewing national statistics they found that being overweight but not obese is not associated with premature death. On the other hand, being underweight is.
The fact that, according to the Health Promotion Unit, every second person in Ireland is overweight could, as it turns out, be controversially a good thing.
Leaving aside the issue of what constitutes a healthy weight, it is important at least to have access to a healthy meal.
To test what is available in a modest sized city, in an age when we rely on strangers to feed us, I took the drive up to Cork, past a couple of petrol stations that cater to an apparently insatiable demand for spicy potato wedges and a Centra and Supervalu offering white, simple carbohydrate demi-baguettes stuffed with cheese or chicken, as well as more potato wedges, and swung over to the office area on the city's east side.
Three years ago when I worked here, lunch was an eating nightmare. The only readily available food was served by a local garage and that was a short drive away.
With 45 minutes to an hour for lunch, the city centre is not an option. The drive in, the struggle for parking . . . Suddenly though the food situation has changed.
At the new Mahon Point shopping centre, close to the office blocks, there are now several new possibilities.
After negotiating the wrong turn in the complex car park I ended up in Debenhams which is experimenting with its new restaurant idea, Concept 2010.
According to restaurant manager Jonathan Sheehan, it "is all about giving customers healthy choices, because happy customers are going to come back".
By the year 2010 every Debenhams in Ireland, the UK and globally will have a Concept 2010 restaurant. What is unique about Concept 2010 is the food factfile.
The customer who might be worrying about a food choice at Debenhams can consult this food factfile to check which products contain nuts, seeds, etc, or to check on the possibility of genetically modified content.
The food factfile is a truly important innovation and a big step forward in accountability. But there's more and that is where Concept 2010 begins to unravel.
Customers who want to check every single ingredient in a Concept 2010 meal can ask to see what Jonathan calls the food bible. I asked to see it.
The store's bible lists every single ingredient for every product on sale in the restaurant.
Consult it and you will see that the food served is heavy on hydrogenated fats and sugar and that liberal use is made of thickeners like modified maize starch.
On my cursory inspection, there is nothing on the Concept 2010 menu that I would eat.
The restaurant is strong on compliance, wonderfully open on the detail of its meals but is replete with fats, sugars and preservatives that facilitate distribution of the meals from a central warehouse in the UK but which are no good for us.
When I asked Debenhams to reconcile the idea of healthy food choices with the use of fats that are known to be unhealthy, sugar and artificial preservatives, spokeswoman Samantha Henry said: "We take on board your comments and, in the light of lifestyle changes and consumer demand, we will continue to review our menu ingredients."
So, one way to a healthy lunch is to complain about unhealthy ingredients.
In garages and supermarkets and convenience stores across the State there is no legal requirement to list the ingredients of the bakery and prepared foods we are increasingly relying on.
Debenhams deserves our thanks for taking an important step towards openness. But we should not confuse this with healthy food.
From Debenhams I strolled round the shopping centre looking for a better option. A local pub was a possibility but the meals were uniformly priced at €9.99, too much for me.
A huge O'Briens offered hand-cut sandwiches (am I alone in feeling handmade is being oversold in Ireland - whoever got a machine to cut a sandwich?). Here's my beef with O'Briens. I don't know what's in the actual wrap. Wraps often contain dextrose - does the O'Briens wrap? Nothing I can see tells me.
And the food that goes into the wrap? There's too little of it. The portion control gives me a gooey piece of bread and a little of something else.
It is commendable to wean people off fatty cooked foods but I refuse to think of a wrap and crisps as healthy.
Before leaving I detoured through the new Tesco. It offers packet takeaways for the evening meal. chicken grills (containing dextrose) and southern fried chicken pops (containing sugar). It also has a new salad bar that presents a lot of mystery - coleslaw in a creamy mayo (no ingredients listed), refined pastas, low-cal coleslaw (no ingredients listed).
In Cork there is more choice but the choices are not necessarily healthy ones and some of the dangers remain deliberately hidden, obscured also by a debate about health that unfortunately refuses to shift its focus from weight.
Here's my point - it is impossible to be health conscious if you are not informed. The obesity debate clouds the importance that should be attached to developing that rare beast - the fully informed consumer.