Gwynnie’s daft diet won’t do her (or the goats) any good

IWAS assigned the task of booking lunch for me and two friends last week. I started online, then came to the section marked ‘dietary requirements’. I started to type what fast turned into a dissertation.

‘Hello. Well. I’m vegan but I will occasionally eat eggs from chickens I’ve met personally. I’m allergic to mushrooms, peppers, big tomatoes, aubergine, raw onion, spiky leaves, watercress, fennel, supermarket bread and rocket. [I find it easier to say I’m allergic to something than to admit I simply don’t like it.]

‘My friend is vegetarian, but she hates goat’s cheese, and is allergic to peanuts, walnuts and doesn’t like rice [who doesn’t like rice?].

‘My final friend is vegetarian, but cannot eat gluten, as she puffs up, or sugar, as there is a type 2 diabetes marker in her genes and she doesn’t want unattractive feet. Neither drinks alcohol; I do, but only if the label has a “suitable for vegans” sticker, which I’ll need to see… Ooh, and can you check whether the panna cotta contains animal gelatine?’

I pressed Send. They replied by email, saying they’re fully booked. And who can blame them? The three of us (not to mention coeliac boyfriend who, every time we sit down in a restaurant, says parrot fashion, ‘Have you any gluten-free bread, and when you bring my gin and tonic, only bring a paper straw, as I don’t do plastic’ – will have to look elsewhere.

We have all unwittingly become doppelgangers of Gwyneth Paltrow, a woman who announced last week she is about to drink only goat’s milk for eight days: I imagine she will become even more pasty.

We all now own spiralisers, turning courgettes into pasta. We make our own granola, as commercial brands contain too much refined sugar and the wrong sort of oil (coconut is the only type to use, apparently, and the only acceptable sweetener is agave nectar).

You might think that, as a lifelong anorexic and orthorexic – I have an obsession with food being organic and healthy – I’m in favour of promoting all these food fads. I’m not. Most faddists go carb-free, sugar-free or booze-free not because they hate the stuff or out of principle, but as a perverse kind of status symbol. ‘Look at me, with my superior self-control.’

NOT long ago, I had lunch with a supermodel, and she wouldn’t order risotto as ‘I don’t eat white food before six o’clock’. That sort of reasoning means you’re as nutty as a fruitcake. Not that I eat fruitcake. Can’t stand sultanas and raisins.

I’ve actually lightened up over the years. As a child, I’d scream at my mum if she put butter on my toast, or dumplings in the stew. In my 20s, I’d take my own jar of decaffeinated coffee on holiday. On my wedding day, I eschewed the organic chocolate cake I’d had hand-made by nuns in Notting Hill. But these days I feel that, unless you’re coeliac, these food fads aren’t healthy – and new reports hint going gluten-free might lead to diabetes. Instead, they are substitutes for a moral compass.

This is why I fell out with the Hemsley sisters: they are all about courgette pasta, but they smother it with beef ragu! Durum wheat is hardly the villain of the piece.

My long list of things I won’t eat stems from a fear of getting fat. I became vegetarian to avoid my mum’s Sunday roasts: vanity came first, ethics later.

The problem is, all these new followers of food fads, the Gwynnies and the Ellas and that blogger who calls eggs ‘hens’ periods’, are too myopic. They’ve mistaken a fear of food, which is a psychiatric disease, for a lifestyle choice.

Like Camilla Fayed, who recently opened veggan eaterie Farmacy in Notting Hill (veggan means it is vegan but it does serve eggs), they are restricting their diets for supposed health benefits, not animal welfare or the planet. Gwynnie’s goat’s milk is a terrible choice: most billy goats are killed at birth for dog food. Not one of these clean eaters is revolutionary: Ella Woodward said that although she’s vegetarian, she lets her husband eat meat at home. It’s like Emmeline Pankhurst saying, well, I tied myself to railings for suffrage, but my old man still hasn’t mastered loading the dishwasher, bless ’im…’

How about, this Lent, we try giving up giving things up?