The pulse of good eating begins with grains and sprouts, says Marian Pallister

IF you sift through the bric-a-brac of childhood memories which clutters a dusty corner of your brain, you will discover, among the potato cut daubings and the Squezy Liquid bottles transformed into vases, pencil holders, and vanity sets for Mother's Day, a wad of lint sprinkled with cress seed. You may not recall what happened to those seeds, whether they fell on stony lint and perished, or among tares and were choked, or whether you eventually ate cress sandwiches on the lawn, bursting with the pride of achievement. Now that you have remembered the principle of the thing, however, you will understand where Eddie Cairney is coming from.

Cairney is lean and lithe and his blue eyes retain the intensity of colour you would expect in a five-year-old. His mission in life is to give others the secret of his good health, which is a diet of what he calls ''living foods''. His own diet packs a solar energy punch if you follow his logic about eating food at its most nutritious, when the sun has warmed the seed and brought forth sprouts. So keen is he to spread his message that he has created a sprouting jar to make the whole process as simple as possible, and if you are willing to devote your kitchen windowsill to a collection of these squat, pot-bellied glass containers with their meshed lids, you can lend a whole new dimension to the phrases ''grow your own'' and ''pick your own''.

If your children are picky about packing in their five portions of fruit and vegetables a day, this could be the devious way of getting them to eat healthily. If they have put the mung beans or the alfalfa seed in the jar, soaked them overnight, washed and drained them to a specific time table (don't worry, three minutes each morning for three mornings is all it take to produce a crop), then, just as the children of yesteryear delighted in their cress, so yours will want to dip a hand into the sprouting jar for a handful of their own handiwork.

Grown-ups, of course, can derive just as much pleasure from growing sprouts from a whole range of pulses and seeds. Quinoa, puy lentils, chick peas, fenugreek, and wheat are just some of the basics which will produce sprouts you only have to put on your plate.

Cairney was brought up in what he describes as a ''mince and tatties household''. He gave little thought to his diet until he was working as an electrical engineer in New Zealand 15 years ago and found himself floored. ''I couldn't lift my head off the pillow,'' he recalls. He discovered he was suffering from a series of food intolerances, and radically overhauled his fuel intake. His culinary sins were to eat too late at night, to eat junk food, to drink tea and coffee. A naturopath introduced him to bean sprouts. Now he is bursting with energy, and is so confident sprouts are in the main responsible for his state of good health that he says when his book on living foods is published he intends to celebrate by living solely on sprouts for a week.

He believes eating food this fresh, this new, can avoid food intolerances. Even the bogey grain wheat, which seems to cause so many people problems today, is acceptable as a sprout. Cairney explains: ''People have wheat intolerances because they take a whole grain of wheat and mill it, which leaves the raw protein that remains even when you bake it. That raw protein goes into the body, which has to find enzymes to break it down, which is a very difficult thing to do. When you can break protein down into amino acids, they are user friendly. Protein broken down into amino acids by the sprouting process can be happily assimilated, even by people with intolerances, and the sprouts can be baked into a bread.''

This is certainly not steak and two veg, but Cairney says sprouts have such exciting flavours that even the most entrenched carnivore will enjoy trying them. They may even become hooked. Certainly, puy lentil sprouts taste like the baby pea pods you scrumped from the garden as children, and children love quinoa sprouts because they taste like peanuts.

Cairney says: ''They retain their own unique flavour, so you don't have to doctor them up. We doctor food up because we knock the stuffing out of it. We doctor food up because we want to change the taste, because we want to give it a bit of a lift. We have to stimulate the taste buds with condiments and spices.''

He uses peas as the example we all know. We enjoy fresh young peas because they retain their flavour. If we put peas in tins and serve them up as mushy peas, we need to put vinegar on them to change the taste.

He also points out that children prefer raw carrots to cooked carrots, and believes that the conversion to a healthier diet is better achieved if we start young because most of us eat as we do because it is what we have been raised on, what we are used to.

Cairney is a vegetarian who eats mainly organic food, and he has heard all the criticisms in the book which people on a more conventional diet level at what they term ''cranks'' like him. He retaliates by saying: ''One of the reasons you can choose to eat sprouts is out of sheer laziness. They are for people who can't be bothered cooking, and a bonus is that they taste nice.'' He also sees them as the antidote for the 3am snacker who craves a fix for their low blood-sugar levels. Sprouts offer instant energy, far surpassing the chocolate bar or even the piece of fruit, he claims. ''It is a case of finding out that there is more to life than taking stuff out of a container and sticking it into a microwave oven.''

He accepts that people do not like being preached at, particularly on food, but he believes that, in an age when people are becoming more and more worried about what is happening to what they eat - whether it contains additives, whether it has been genetically modified, whether it has been contaminated by sprays - that to be able to control what you eat by sprouting organically produced pulses and grains at a minimal cost in your own home must have increasing appeal.

The Cairney children have an appreciation of food, aware of the fact man cannot live by burger alone.

They love the recipes their mum comes up with, such as the sprout pilau, which adds red peppers, soaked sultanas, onion, mug bean sprouts, and alfalfa sprouts to rice with a dressing of oil, apple cider vinegar, garlic, curry powder, honey, and green pepper. And Cairney is happy they get much of their energy direct from the sun rather than second or third-hand through processed food. This, he says, is food at its healthiest and purest.

n Telephone Living Foods, Broughty Ferry, 01382 736344, for information about sprouting jars.

Crunch time for sprouts

Mung bean sprouts are high in energy and add crunch appeal to any salad. High in vitamin C and the B complex, they add bulk but no calories to salads and stir-fries

Alfalfa sprouts are rich in vitamins and minerals and may help lower blood cholesterol levels. The vitamin K content may help prevent the loss of calcium and reduce the possibility of osteoporosis

Lentil sprouts are low in fats, high in nutrients needed for good health. The folate and iron content make them a good choice in pregnancy

If it is a seed or a pulse, you can probably sprout it. It is worth trying, for the surprise factor