I went in for a fishfinger, but all I could see were flavinoids and lypocenes

Food is no longer sustenance but a subject, as the seriously rich find the best way to dispose of their money is to eat it
    • The Guardian,
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I am deeply moved. The food retailer, Waitrose, is so alarmed by the new American import, Whole Foods, that it is conveying customers by chauffeur-driven car to its Bloomsbury store and home again while its Marylebone outlet is being refurbished. Sensing trouble, Whole Foods has posted security guards outside its Kensington emporium. On the opening night they looked as if they had orecchiette al pesto in their ears. Clearly an iron curtain is descending across London. On either side of the W1 no-man's-land, west is rich and east is cool.

The Guardian is rightly concerned with the afflictions of the poor, but let us turn for a moment turn to those of the rich, the seriously rich with more money than sensible needs to meet. I put this threshold at £100,000 a year. This is no longer a tiny minority nor, thanks to Gordon Brown, one confined to the private sector. A third of a million people in England earn six figures, and outside London I would bet that the majority do so in some sense from the public sector.

Every doctor is now above this threshold, along with 600 local government officers, 302 BBC employees, 91 at the Royal Mail and 76 at Transport for London. These organisations could probably double their published figure by including their private consultants, on which Transport for London, for instance, spent a stupefying £222m last year. Nor do the totals include such state sub-contractors as Serco, Capita and Carillion, or the parastatal utilities running the railways, water, gas and electricity companies.

In other words, a large number of people have large disposable incomes and need new ways to spend them. Brown's policy of holding down income and property taxes and boosting expenditure taxes such as VAT has left the poor poorer and the rich very much richer. For the latter, the mortgage is paid, the second car bought, the country cottage restored. After the sixth overseas holiday in a year, Gatwick palls.

Nor has much of this group yet been hit by Britain's most savage supertax: offspring out of education and not in gainful employment. This floating pool of the middle-class young "waiting for something interesting to turn up" claim parental support for potential careers as actors, writers, film-makers, artists, journalists, publishers and "something creative". Half the rich of my acquaintance are running family Arts Councils and in-house Save the Children funds.

So what do the rich do with their surplus money? They eat it, converting the process into a semi-mystical experience. A loaf of bread is no longer a loaf but, at double the price, a sourdough, ciabatta, sperlonga, chollah, wheat-free or chickpea. Food has contrived to cross a conceptual barrier from banality to intellectualism. When I asked at Whole Foods for my beloved fishfinger, I came close to being asked to leave.

The walls glared down at me with more moral maxims than in a Welsh chapel. "No transfats from hydrogenated oils," they cried. "Eggs from cage-free birds." The store even had a changing room, as if this were a total immersion Baptist church.

Foodism is no longer a sustenance but a subject, located somewhere between chemistry and theology. At its heart lies the new superfood, rich in phytonutrients and anti-oxidants (and mind-boggling in air miles). The ancient pomegranate upstages the humble cranberry. The lettuce vanishes before sprouting purple broccoli, its pristine petals dusted with powdered linseed. It competes with drizzled watercress ("Death to all free radicals"). Potatoes are sold with added earth.

Our old friend the blueberry is outgunned by the Chinese goji, with its 18 amino acids and 21 trace minerals, its betacarotene, its polysaccharides and its mind-numbing price-weight ratio. Getting each berry to London from the hillsides of the Yellow river must require 10 times its bulk in carbon emissions. But superfood travels club class because it is food only in name. Its character is that of moral statement. Nor does any of this require cooking. Shelf upon shelf of "pre-made" foods are designed so that power women and yummy mummies need only five minutes to prepare them, even if they took two hours to buy.

Where once stood sales ladies advising on a bechamel sauce, now stands a different priesthood, laying down the approved balance of omegas, luteins, lypocenes and flavanoids. You may not be allergic but you might still be "intolerant" and thus in need of a personal nutritionist. It is goodbye Delia Smith and Nigella Lawson: chemists are the new kings of the kitchen. A recent newspaper food supplement cited no cook but a dozen scientists from laboratories in Newcastle, Reading, Nottingham, Illinois and the US department of agriculture.

This return to food is a genuine mystery. At one level it is obscene. Before any of this stuff is eaten, 40% is thrown away, to become the most expensive landfill in the world. When it is eaten the overwhelming majority of its chemical compounds simply convert into expensive urine. Food fads have never featured in futurology. The percentage of British national expenditure devoted to food fell steadily in the 50 years after the second world war, mostly because people had enough of it and spent their surplus income on other things. Science fiction predicted that everyone would soon be eating pills.

How the rich spend their money is, of course, their business. What is intriguing about the new stores is their ability to take the base metal of food and convert it into gold, not just of taste but of high seriousness. They offer excess but with added moral purpose. The rich are spending ever more on food, both in restaurants and on exotic ingredients. Perhaps the Bank of England could shortcircuit the production cycle by printing £50 notes on anti-oxidant ricepaper, served as a lightly wilted salad with virgin oil and balsamic dressing.

Despite the waste this is not all bad. The exotic-ingredients mania must be sustaining the economies of many otherwise destitute countries, much as the plethora of food outlets sustains local architects, designers, cooks, waiters, sales staff and van drivers. An economic virtue of the spending pattern of the rich is that it tends to be labour intensive.

But what next? Major food chains are now selling what was considered the preserve of soul food cranks a generation ago. Yoghurt, sesame and nut extract were once strictly for beards, sandals and Glastonbury. Now they have taken Kensington High Street by storm.

I can only assume that after the soul food will come the soul, after the body the mind. Tesco will offer five minutes of oxygen inhalant flown in from the Arctic to raise green awareness. Waitrose will hit back with 30-minute Buddhist chants. Sainsbury's will invite shoppers to sit under a triangle to feel the vibrations of Omega 3. Whole Foods will offer a choice of pre-made religions with "guaranteed happiness or your money back". There will be lectures, therapies, analysis and book signings.

It will cost a packet. But as they said of the Rolls-Royce, if you ask the price you can't afford it. You should have stuck with the sandwich.

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