I know you're all for a bit of trend-watching while you eat your Sunday brunch, so here is your handy stick-on-the-fridge guide to the Sabatier-edge of culinary cool this season...
The new ingredients
You can forget saving up for that £67,000 Rorgue cooker like Gordon Ramsay's. The big new trend is Uncooking. A clarion call to hopeless cooks across the land, the idea is that nothing should be heated beyond 118°C (it kills off the vitamins). Instead, we should all be eating raw: the choice is endless - hemp seeds, beetroot, alfalfa sprouts. Lovely (well, raw food fan Demi Moore thinks so).You can now visit Britain's first raw restaurant, Little Earth Café in London's Primrose Hill (but of course). Jude'n' Sienna popped in, possibly for the menu's highlight, the 'dehydrated tart'.
As David Wolfe, America's...#65279; raw food guru, puts it: 'The psychedelic feeling of pure joy that one derives from eating raw foods cannot be compared to anything one has experienced before ... Inner cleanliness is an exquisite feeling! On top of all this, raw plant food gives you superhuman powers!' Wow! Bring those sprouts over here! As if to tie up the trend, New Yorkers are currently big on crudo, an Italian version of sushi. There are crudo bars springing up all over Manhattan, so you can bet your carrot batons they'll be here soon. www.fresh-network.com
The new etiquette
Once you have prepared your tuna crudo with olive praline and caper espresso, you can plump for the next hot trend: Bring Your Own Food to a Dinner Party. Again, it's all the rage among New Yorkers, thanks to their fussy predilection for gluten-free, no-dairy, personalised grub. Even in the UK, it's a conundrum to know quite what to serve to friends. There are so many ways to get it wrong. Fish, of course, is right out (serving sea bass to friends should get you slapped round the face with a wet cod). Cheese hails from the devil's larder if you're on GI; fruit is forbidden on Atkins. And that's before you've worked your way through the list of contemporary food intolerances. The other day, I noticed that the menu at a restaurant in west London included the invitation to 'Please let your waitress know of your allergies'. I felt almost obliged to tell her that I suffer from mild hay fever on hot days as I ordered my Dirty Martini. (Oh, come, come, surely you're pouring extra olive brine into your cocktail? Course you are. Unless your salt intake is already dangerously high).
Anyhow, the upshot of all this picky-picky is that Park Avenue hostesses are throwing in the tea towel and inviting guests to bring their own meals along to parties, and then - once delivered to the table in its mismatched Le Creuset - there's a sort of pot-luck fork-fight for the tastiest morsels, a culinary version of the car-key game that swinging couples played in the seventies. Without serious planning, of course, the combinations are likely to get quite obscure - think pad thai and Crepes Suzettes all in the space of a single repast. Which brings us to...
The hot chef
It's Jason Atherton at Maze in London's Grosvenor Square - the latest uber-opening from Gordon Ramsay Holdings. Atherton's schtick is to show off a smorgasbord of offerings - roasted turbot with five-spice oxtail, say, or grilled spring lamb with cinnamon sweetbreads. A Maze supper could meander its delicate way through eight or nine dishlettes - through wood-fried squab and Orkney scallops, pork cheeks and tempura of monkfish. The tapas approach does mean, of course, that if no one's counting, you could consume a representative from every protein, carbohydrate, fat and vitamin group at one blow-out sitting. Which will soon have you waddling off to get hold of...
The new diet
If you have been listening carefully, you will already have lost a tenth of your body weight on the GI Diet. For anyone concerned about being on the same diet as everyone else (which, in certain circles is a bit like turning up to a soirée in the same dress as Susan from accounts), there's now a new, more precise version doing the rounds. It's based on the concept of 'GL', or Glycaemic Load, and takes account of the portion size as well as the index of the food on your plate. It is being popularised by Dr Lindberg, an expat Greek who settled in Norway and proceeded to spread the word about the Mediterranean diet. Now 23 per cent of Norwegians have changed their diet as a result of reading his book. Start dropping the terms 'trad med' and 'slow carb' and 'I'd kill for a kofta' into your conversation this summer.
The Greek Doctor's Diet, £9.99, Cygnus
The must-see website
For anyone still engaged in no-name, old-school dieting, there's a new and lazy way to count calories. Nutracheck, accessed via your mobile phone, will tell you the calorie content of over 30,000 foods. No more sitting in a restaurant like a rabbit caught in headlights, staring at the raspberry pavlova and wondering whether it's a good idea. Nutracheck will tell you that it isn't. It also provides a 'food swap' service (let it know what you fancy and it offers a healthy alternative) and a barcode quick search (key in the last four digits of a supermarket code and it spits out the calorie content). If you really want to lose weight you could always go low-tech, get off the phone and go for a quick run around the garden.
The hot drink
Spike the diet and squeeze an extra little meal into your day. Everybody's doing it. At the newly opened Tea Palace in London's Westbourne Grove, you can bask in the company of Stella McCartney and Kate Moss, and indulge in tea and crumpets (served with honeycomb!). There are 150 teas to choose from, including Builder's Brew - 'designed to be enjoyed with milk', although not, apparently, with 12 sugars and a copy of the Sun. I was tempted to order a cup of Dragon Phoenix Pearl tea - 'hand-rolled by skilled artisans into small pearl shapes'. But it was £8.50 a pot! This is chi-chi cha, no mistake.
175 Westbourne Grove, W11
The top trend
If you go for the health-giving green tea option at the Tea Palace, you'll be tapping into two trends at a time. At Tesco, 'brain foods' have been dubbed a 'major retail movement'; sales of salmon and tuna have doubled, avocado consumption is up by 30 per cent and blueberries have seen a staggering 131 per cent increase in sales. During the exam season, students across the land were mainlining smoked mackerel, cranberries and Pro-Plus in a bid to remember when Norman the Conqueror got here. Incidentally, thyme should now be your herb of choice, since it possesses unfeasible super-antioxidant properties - and all this while, you've been sticking it up a chicken's jacksy! No wonder my friend Alfalfa is thinking of calling her new-born girl Omega-3. It's a revolution, sweeties, and you're in the middle of it.
· Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall returns next month. Hugh's production company is looking for people who are about to start a food business for a new TV series. Contact paul@keofilms.com