Willy Trolove: Fusspots threaten survival of the great dinner party

My girlfriend is about to reach one of those milestones when it isn't acceptable to remember her birthday halfway through the big day, to buy her a book she has already read, and to present her with a hurried fistful of the neighbour's geraniums. Instead, something lavish is required. That something is a dinner party.

I love dinner parties. A good dinner party prods its participants to move beyond small-talk and busy themselves with the serious business of bullshit. Nothing, but nothing, is better than an evening spent in the company of friends and strangers, eating and drinking, goading and arguing, telling lies, bolstering prejudices, spreading gossip, and upsetting the other guests with a calculated lack of tact.

The dinner party is one of the last great democratic rituals. Around the table, free speech reigns. Everyone is equal - saints and scoundrels, extroverts and perverts. With the right amount of wine, the shells that people spend a lifetime growing around themselves can be prised apart to reveal the dark and tender hearts that beat beneath.

Alas, the dinner party is under attack. On all sides the menacing armies of political correctness and fashionable causes beat their muffled drums.

On one front are the drink-driving battalions. Once upon a time, drinking and driving was part of the 6 o'clock swill, but now a drinking driver is an outcast, a deviant, a murderer-in-waiting. And so, these days, dinner parties are full of couples arguing about who didn't drink last time and exactly how many glasses of wine is enough.

On another front are the Gurkhas of guilt. How dare we eat chicken, they say, while poor wee battery hens grow fat in cages the size of this dinner plate? How dare we eat fish while the Japanese strip the oceans?

But the biggest threat to the dinner party comes from the fussy eaters. In today's self-obsessed society, it is trendy to have some kind of food hang-up or eating disorder. Gone are the salad days of broccoli when we ate what was put in front of us. Now we eat only what we are given when we have determined its origins, counted its carbs, and confirmed with the chef that it doesn't contain any trace of peanuts.

Sometimes it seems that everyone under 40 is carrying around a list of the things they can and cannot eat without haemorrhaging.

There are the vegetarians and vegans, who nobody can tell apart but who require sprouts and tofu, dietary supplements, and that imitation meat which looks and tastes like meat but, for all anyone knows, is made out of recycled underpants.

There are the anti-GM bores, who refuse to eat anything that might have been fiddled with, and who are only happy when chewing native grasses they have gathered themselves.

There are the fad dieters. One week it's WeightWatchers, the next it's Jenny Craig. Before long they are on the Atkins diet, the birdseed diet, the everything-but-croissants diet, the bacon diet and, finally, the eat-more, exercise-less diet.

There are the intolerants. The yeast intolerants require unleavened bread, pastry like plywood, and biscuits that would be handy for repiling the house. The lactose intolerants need milk made from vegetables. And the gluten intolerants eat, as far as I can tell, nothing.

Worst of all are the texture intolerants who, thanks to some childhood trauma, are unable to eat simple things such as tomatoes or mushrooms, and prefer to take their food mulched up and through a straw.

And so, putting together a dinner party menu that suits everyone is a gastronomical nightmare. Bob likes pumpkin but will come out in a rash if he eats meat. Mary loves meat but will froth at the mouth if she has cream. John can have cream but only if it has been strained through a cheesecloth.

To figure out what to cook, I shall ask the dinner party guests to fill out a preference card like the menus you get in motels when ordering your continental breakfast. It will have tick boxes for every eating disorder and food allergy. It will have a space for them to sign, once they have completed contact details of their dietician, their allergy specialist, their GP, and their next-of-kin.

Of course, this might discourage the fussy eaters from coming to the dinner party but it will, at least, give me something to chuckle about as I eat my full-fat soup, GM corn, carbo-rich potatoes and battery-raised satay chicken - all on my own.