On New Year's Day this year a young man in Dallas, Texas began a one-year experiment to see if he could live by the Internet alone, ordering all his food, furniture and clothes over the web. Realistically the outcome was never going to be in doubt - online shopping is very advanced in the US, with large population centres well served by companies such as Peapod, which started an email shopping service as far back as 1989, and WebVan, whose delivery staff unpack the groceries in your kitchen.
If he tried the same trick here in Ireland, he'd starve to death within a week, although he wouldn't have any shortage of books, CDs or airline flights. For all the talk, ecommerce is still very limited in this country. The main things people are buying over the web are services or non-perishable goods, and those are generally sent to you from overseas.
The number of people with Internet access in Ireland is approaching half a million and users here are rapidly getting more comfortable with the idea of entering their credit card details on a web page. But the supermarket chains seem to think Ireland's level of home access is still too low to make a big launch worthwhile at this stage.
Superquinn says it is "looking into" online shopping, but sees the distribution of fresh food as something which will take time to organise. A Tesco Ireland spokeswoman says the company is "gauging customer demand" with a view to developing online grocery shopping in the future.
Such fears are not evident in Britain, where Tesco expects annual sales of £125 million from its home shopping service, Tesco Direct. The service already has 250,000 registered users.
A potentially exciting development was the launch 10 days ago of Store2Door.net, "Ireland's first virtual supermarket," on a trial basis within a 30 km radius of Dublin.
Supported by the Musgrave/Today Today group, the launch was very low-profile, to give the operators time to sort out inevitable teething problems (for example, you can't even get into the site unless you have the most recent version of the ShockWave Flash software, which will discourage many prospective home shoppers at first).
When it gets up and running, Store2Door will let you select from 5,000 product lines and will deliver your groceries the next day in one of three time slots which you choose.
Our experimental home shopper does have a couple of other options. He could email a lunch order to O'Brien's Irish Sandwich Bars (lunch@obriens.ie), but would then have to go in person to one of their two email outlets in Dublin (Grafton Street and Upper Baggot Street) to pick up the sandwich, which defeats the purpose.
On the other hand, he could invite four or more friends around for lunch and thereby qualify for the O'Brien's platter service - order by 11 a.m. for lunchtime delivery. O'Brien's has only just launched a website and hopes to have all its 31 Irish outlets geared up for web orders within a few months.
Other lunchtime delivery outlets are hard to find on the web. Bendini & Shaw's, another sandwich shop, in Dublin is "thinking about it", but doesn't have a website yet.
Now if the house-bound shopper has a big wallet he could quite easily live on smoked salmon, pate de foie gras and expensive cheese. Gourmet food is one area which has proved very successful online in Ireland, because the products tend to be less perishable and often are not available in many shops.
Gourmet France, which imports pate de foie gras and other luxury French food from the south-west of France, began selling online in September of last year and has been "astounded" by the online demand, according to its managing director, Christopher Logue. Sixty per cent of their orders now comes via the web.
Christopher feels Ireland is still well behind Britain in terms of users' readiness to pay online. Most of those who order at the Gourmet France site take the option of paying later by cheque. The site is easy to use and includes recipes which suggest ways to use the company's products. Delivery is free to anywhere in Ireland.
Bewley's Hampers, which packs Bewley's products into "gourmet Irish food baskets" costing anything from £25 to £700, also started online selling last autumn. It sold more than 600 hampers through their website in December, about 5 per cent of overall orders. Your order is confirmed instantly and the hamper delivered anywhere in the world by Federal Express within five working days. You can even type in a message and have it handwritten onto the card attached to the hamper if you're sending it as a gift.
But what of the most obvious area of food delivery - ordering your evening meal at a whim and having it delivered within minutes? Colin Gerstein of Irish-Net, the Internet solutions company behind Store2Door, predicts that Internet users in Ireland will soon be able to do this online rather than by phone.
For now, though, if you're determined to feed yourself using the Internet, you'll need to anticipate your culinary desires a day or two in advance and you'll require an appetite for gourmet food.