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I turned forty years old on the Equinox. I share a birthday with JS Bach and Russ Meyer, so from the sublime to the – well, I guess it depends on your opinion of Bach. I don’t make a thing of birthdays, usually, but I enjoy the type of cooking involved in social events and Kate sold me on a theme for the party.

I have very fond memories of the family get-togethers of my childhood, in rural South Australia through the late seventies and early eighties. If I ever ran a restaurant I would want it to mimic the experience, somehow. There would be a gas griller and a keg of beer, and a tape player with a pile of tapes, all containing the music of Slim Dusty. Trestle tables would be set up and the surfaces lined with butcher’s paper. On one table would be salads, which would all have meat in them, and on the other would be a variety of multi-coloured home-made desserts, usually containing jelly and marshmallows.

To me, that’s probably as good as it gets. While I don’t doubt that finer fare exists, I have yet to enjoy the same level of pleasure in a commercial setting. I doubt that it’s possible without some pre-existing personal relationship between the people who prepare the food and the people who consume it. Social food has meaning beyond and sometimes unrelated to satisfying base nutritional requirements.

Kate sent out invites using modern methods, through email, Facebook and a few phone calls. To suit the ‘theme’, Kate asked people to bring a dessert or a salad, of the kind that was popular in the seventies.

This made me feel a little sad. Somewhere between my childhood and now, food changed. Partly it’s changed circumstances: I sort of made the shift from rural working-class life and culture to a kind of middle-class urbanity. My tastes have changed. To some of my friends, the idea of social food is fairly alien. Middle-class preferences are for reproductions of other people’s cuisines, the particulars of which depend almost wholly on current fashion. The food Kate was describing seemed shameful to some of them, like a trap set to trigger deeply-felt status anxieties. One refused and said they would bring a ‘good’ salad.

The idea of having a theme for a social function seemed alien but unavoidable. Few of the people that I know have a strong sense of identity attached to the foods they consume, not in the way that the people around me when I was growing up did. For better and for worse; I remember various foodstuffs I’d now consider staples being referred to as ‘wog food’ or worse. But at the same time, nobody talked about authenticity, or making other people’s food. The food they made belonged to them, and by sharing it they were sharing themselves.

Browsing through old cookbooks, there was a fairly abrupt transition in the seventies, from cookbooks that focussed on entertaining guests or cooking for pleasure, to books that promoted simple cooking or healthy cooking above all else. The involved desserts and carefully crafted appetisers, meant to be made at home before transporting to social events, became unfashionable and were mostly replaced by commercial substitutes, in much the same way that commercial interests like shopping malls supplanted town squares in the eighties.

An unhealthy paranoia about food hygiene and home preparation standards, often the result of overzealous regulation and commercial lobbying, combined with puritanical notions about health and persecutory fantasies about pleasurable eating, invoking a litany of negative consequences resulting from even the briefest transgression, have made sharing food outside of the immediate family unit a morally and ethically loaded act. The solution, often enough, is to avoid the situation entirely. Eating a meal before the social event or, as host, providing solely commercially-prepared food, are increasingly common occurrences. There is little value given to preparing food for others as an act of friendship, or respect, or love.

Conversely, there seems to be no shame in providing for guests in the most perfunctory fashion. If effort is involved, it is aimed solely at boosting the host’s social status; evidence of the host’s good taste and ability to conform to current fashions through seemingly authentic reproductions of whichever dishes are currently favoured by the established culinary authorities. Any concession to the needs or preferences of the guest are negotiated as a series passive-aggressive refusals, often involving squeamishness masquerading as morality or some self-diagnosed physical intolerance (statistically, these are significantly more likely to be imagined than real).

Puritanism, perhaps an expression of the cultural implications of the fifty-fold increase in the incidence of obsessive compulsive disorders over the last thirty years, has severely curtailed the imaginative and aesthetically grandiose elements once common in social foods. The ideologies of healthy eating have become so constrictive and constipated as to disallow any expression of unrestrained joy through food and drink, even for a special occasion, when the rules of everyday nutritional balance should be relaxed or, ideally, abandoned completely.

The event went well. People ate, on the whole, much more than they should on any average day. There was a trestle table for the desserts, not as many as I remembered from my childhood, and not as skilfully prepared (the knowledge of such things, and the skills required, having atrophied), but still, I was moved that there were people who would care enough about me to do such things.

Over the past couple of years I’ve found myself having heated discussions with people online about food and the politics of food, and invariably the biggest douchebags quote Michael Pollan, usually as their sole point of reference.

I’ve been writing about the politics of food since before Michael Pollan started, so I’ve paid attention to his increasingly quackish claims, and even read one of his stupid fucking books (In Defense of Food; I couldn’t stomach another). I’m not a fan, to be frank. But criticism of Michael Pollan leads to invariably aggressive attacks from his fans/followers, with an intensity that is nothing short of religious fervour.

Which makes me wonder: what is it that makes Michael Pollan’s most ardent fans such total douchebags?

I’ve thought about it, and I have a couple of ideas. The first reason, I suspect, is that most Michael Pollan fans have almost no pre-existing knowledge of the subjects that he makes pronouncements about. I suspect that few of them have any scientific training, or first-hand familiarity with food production methods. Many of them have probably never seen a feed animal up close, let alone slaughtered one. Mostly, their knowledge of nutrition will have come from two main sources: advertising and, since his audience is predominantly middle-class, the lifestyle sections of newspapers, neither of which provide a terribly useful or reliable framework for understanding a very complex subject.

Without any sort of structured understanding of the issues, one relies on feelings or hunches about things; prejudice, in other words. And that’s where Michael Pollan is a viking. There is nothing in his work that challenges any of the prejudices or values that you could expect your average white, middle-class urban dweller to already be convinced are self-evident truths.

Very few of his claims stand up to any sort of rigorous inspection, claims that we are all getting sicker, that the great unwashed masses make poor food choices, and so on. But to a person who instinctively believes these things to be true, to whom these claims ‘feel’ right, having them reinforced by reading them in print bolsters what is, essentially, bigotry.

My partner writes about issues of faith from a sympathetic but outside perspective. While now a firm atheist, she was brought up in missionary communities, wrote a book about English missionaries in the Gobi, and has a pretty firm understanding of the mentality of evangelicals.

Many evangelicals feel confused that non-believers are not convinced by quotations from the Bible. They find it very hard to put themselves in the shoes of someone who doesn’t accept that the Bible is the final arbiter of all things, the written word of God. Pollanites are hardly different. There’s the same failure to accept that, perhaps, there’s a whole world of different, often conflicting, research and conclusions and opinions. But, since the word of Pollan is the only authority they are at all familiar with, most discussions end up as little more than a series of increasingly louder repetitions of the same paraphrased arguments. In other words, it’s like trying to make sense to an angry parrot.

But perhaps the worst bit of intellectual charlatanry is the way that Pollan denies authority. Now, as someone with a background in the hard sciences, I understand that you should never accept an argument from authority. But dismissing authority is a different matter altogether. He writes:

So on whose authority do I purport to speak? I speak mainly on the authority of tradition and common sense. Most of what we need to know about how to eat we already know, or once did until we allowed the nutrition experts and the advertisers to shake our confidence in common sense, tradition, the testimony of our senses, and the wisdom of our mothers and grandmothers.

The authority of tradition and common sense or, in other words, mindless conformity and prejudice. He both dismisses all others as false prophets and sets up the readers themselves as ‘authorities’ with no need for further qualifications: they already know everything there is to know, and all else is lies and trickery. This, I think, is the real reason why Pollanites are douchebags.