As porrige oats is a slow release energy food it is a great way to start the day on a cold winters morning & as a couple of hardened camping friends of mine at Glastonbury festival taught me this year it can also be pretty good raw with cold milk & fruit on a hot summers day to give the energy needed to last for several hours.

Porridge is a great breakfast as it has a low Glycaemic Index & so is absorbed slowly into the bloodstream helping to keep blood sugar levels stable.

In Scotland the traditional way to prepare porridge is by using oatmeal, water & salt. The traditional tool for stirring the porridge is a flat, wooden spatula like tool called a spurtle. The World Porridge Making Championships (The Golden Spurtle) are held in Carrbridge in Inverness-shire where contestants make a traditional bowl & a speciality bowl, which in last year championships included one participant making porridge ice-cream. That I’d like to try, well, I’ve had Irn Bru sorbet & that was good. Personally I tend to stick to cooked porridge with dates & honey or brown sugar, I went through a phase of adding dried apple slices to my hot breakfast but my dried apple supply ran out but it was a really nice addition to my morning oats.

Talking of which it is said that porridge can boost libido by balancing the testosterone & oestrogen levels in the body.

Porridge oats do have many uses though appart from providing fuel for the body.

A good facial scrub can be made from pounding porridge oats & salt with a pestle and mortar & adding olive oil.This can be kept in the fridge for subsequent facials.

A way of reducing excema is too put some oats in a tied up sock and to soak the sock and dab onto effected areas.In early Greek & Roman civilizations oats were added to baths to help heal minor skin dissorders.

Oats are a very good natural anti-depressant & also a natural anti-inflamatory.

Beta-Glucan in the cell walls of oat kernals stimulate immune system & aid healing.

Many of these uses for porridge oats have been around for many years but one thing I learnt about porridge recently from ” The Book Of General Ignorance” is how it was used for a nutritional study in the 1950’s.

Quoted from “The Book Of General Ignorance” ISBN 0-571-23368-6

I the 1950’s, researchers from Quaker Oats, Harvard University & The Massachusetts Intitute of Technology conducted experiments to try and understand how nutrients from cereals travelled through the body.

Parents of educationally subnormal children at the Walter E. Fernald State School ( formerly known as the Massachusetts School for Idiotic Children) were asked to let their children become members of a special science club. As part of the club, the children were put on a diet high in nutrients and taken to baseball games.

What was not made clear, however, was that the food the children were given was laced with iron and radioactive calcium so it’s path could be traced in the body. The parents sued the Quaker Oats Company, who agreed to pay out $1.85 million to more than 100 participants in 1997.

My final comment on porridge tonight is that oat porridge has been found in the stomachs of 5,000 year old neolithic bog bodies in Central Europe and Scandinavia. So people have been fueling their bodies with the humble porridge for a long, long time.