For centuries, as a dinner party guest you ate what you were served. Nobody dreamed of calling up their host in advance demanding what they would like on the menu. This is one reason why the dinner party somehow made it through the 1980s era of Tom Wolfe’s ‘Social X Rays’ – Mid-Atlantic society-types who ate nothing and resembled skeletons. Previous threats to the dinner party included the first drink driving laws, which Bron Waugh claimed ruined country social life. Then came the cocaine diet guest (no food touched), who has been spiritually succeeded by the equally annoying Ozempic-jabber, bragging to their hostess about how ‘unhungry’ they feel.  

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Yet, having survived the above, the private dinner party is now finally being killed off by the modern curse of the ‘dietary requirement’. For hosts, it’s just no fun catering for whimsical guest dietary fads (vegan/vegetarian/fibremaxxing) as well as an ever-increasingly eclectic range of religious, cultural, or personal cult diets – such as the Paleo, or the Stone Age Diet, which involves eating only ‘unprocessed’ foods like a cave man/woman. Or there’s the ‘Jain’ diet which is strictly 100 per cent lacto-vegetarian based on ahimsa (non-violence), designed to minimize harm to all living beings. Most are ‘lifestyle........

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