Paul Sheehan, food buff, lover of MasterChef, hater of capitalist food conspiracies, and celebrant of the spirit of the table ...

(Above: the spirit of the table? The New Yorker, December 17, 1973).

Our favourite image in recent times of the curmudgeonly Paul Sheehan was as an Abrahamic figure - perhaps Moses - explaining how the wretched and the poor were responsible for the plight of Greece with their indulgences and indolence - while the meek and mild financiers and bankers, justified in the eyes of the Lord, should inherit the earth.

That's when he's not getting rhapsodic over a thirteen buck loaf of Paddington bread, in A flour blooms - and a family classic is toast of the town.

Ah yes, let the eastern suburbs eat well, and let the Greeks eat their instant sponge from Coles.

Maintaining his schizophrenic capacity for inverted snobbery, Sheehan returns to the food theme in Debunking the myth of food, from fetish to Frankenstein.

Well it's not so much a debunking of the myth, so much as a different kind of fetishising.

Here's how Sheehan summarises his current attitude to food:

I've been to most of the three-hat restaurants but basically I avoid them.

I guess in much the same way as here at the pond, we've met many rich people but basically most of them manage to avoid us. Or we've been to most of the palaces of the world, but only to gawk and then to be evicted while the inhabitants managed to avoid us. Or we've sampled the joys of burger stores around the world, and thanked them for their insight into obesity, and wondered why the likes of Sheehan would continually rabbit on about the splendours of the capitalist system.

You see, there's a problem, and it's not the problem of being able to afford to go to all those three-hat restaurants - or most of them - and then disdain them in lofty tones.

What this tells you is the Good Food Guide has become an arbiter not just of rigour and value, but also of conspicuous consumption.

Ah it's conspicuous consumption, though of course you must first conspicuously consume, before you can announce that your palate is jaded, the sumptuous feasts mean nothing, and you must renounce your Marie Antoinette ways:

When you charge $60 for a main course, the pressure goes up for everyone, including the customers, and the pleasure does not go up accordingly. The meal table is the best setting for the art of life, the confluence of good food, good company, good drink and generosity. It is not about performance art.

Guess that means it's time for the peasants to get back to qu'ils mangent de la brioche. Instant sponge from Coles and you're well on your way to a lovely set of lamingtons.

But strangely, if food isn't about performance art, Sheehan shows as remarkable love for MasterChef:

The show is carefully skewed towards a positive message, with likeable participants, and pays homage to the thought, work and shared experience that goes into a good meal.

Its success is no mystery. Not only is MasterChef built around a subject about which we all have a vested interest, its production values are superb. It is a brilliant piece of creative reality TV.

The heart of the foodie beats strong. Could Sheehan's spiritual home be Adelaide? On and on he raves about the creative team and the raw material in the show, and then it's bummer dude time:

While the show skews towards the positive, it does have its quota of bullying. Making contestants choose their teams one by one means there is always the humiliation of someone being the last chosen, rejected by the group. This does no credit to the three lead producers or the three judges.

Oh dear. That's the whole point of the show, you goose. Ritual humiliation, involving tension, judgement and eviction. So it was at the beginning of reality shows, and so it will be at the end.

While Sheehan is a fail as a television critic, displaying not the slightest interest in the actual mechanisms of MasterChef - sorry Paul, there are only three critics that can continue this week, and ... you're not one of them - he also meanders through what begins to sound like a dangerous anti-capitalist diatribe:

The show gives plenty of plugs for Coles, one of its major sponsors. But you wouldn't want to look too carefully at how Coles and Woolworths, and Aldi, grind down their suppliers, especially farmers. This process, whereby more and more power is accumulated to fewer and fewer giant food suppliers, is the key target of Food, Inc. It debunks the evolution of factory food, the food which most people in Western societies eat most of the time.

Well there's a not insignificant cultural marker for you.

The result is inevitable: epidemics in obesity and diabetes. Malnutrition in the midst of abundance. That is the real cost of factory food.

Make that a triple whammy cultural marker.

Factory food! Paul Sheehan goes greenie and reviles the capitalist system for its abuse of farmers and consumers. But really, Sheehan is just a food snob. Remember that expensive loaf of bread, and the spiritual experience of tasting it, especially the crust, and the epiphany it produced?

Having marvelled in my 20s at the routine quality of the food in Paris people took for granted, it never occurred that, in my lifetime, the food within my life in Australia would, overall, become superior to the food I found in Paris. That I would have a better miche in my own urban village than the miche from Poilane was not an insignificant cultural marker.

Sorry, that was last week's cultural marker, and only for Paddington. This week the cultural marker is obesity and despair!

It seems Sheehan has been profoundly influenced by "one of the most important, and one of the best, films of the year, Food, Inc.", which exposes and indicts the capitalist system.

Next week, Sheehan embraces localism, refusing to eat anything produced more than five kilometres from his home, and slow food, refusing to cook and eat any meal in less than a day?

Oh dear, he's starting to sound like those indolent, indulgent Greeks.

Sheehan sounds positively traumatised, first by Sydney restaurant pricing, and then by the sheer burden that it imposes. Could it be that he finds the pricing a little exuberant, in a way that prevents him from passing judgement on the three hat brigade? He suffers with Greg Doyle for giving up his three hat status, but then berates him for wandering down the road of molecular gastronomy, a road paved with fad and fashion. As opposed to ordinary food buffery, a road paved with fashion and fad.

At the six three-hat restaurants in the Good Food Guide, the average cost of a main dish is $60.

At the most fabled of these restaurants, Tetsuya's, with its compulsory degustation menu for $195 per person, the cost of dinner for two, with tip and wine, starts at $500.

Sixty bucks. Yet down the road at Faheems Fast Food, you can cop a main for ten bucks! The best chicken tandoor in Sydney ...

Some times I pity the ponces in the eastern suburbs, but seeing we're shocked by the pricing, what's Sheehan's alternative?

At the other extreme of the food chain we are seeing the fetishing of chefs, which is also against the true spirit of the table.

The spirit of the table? What on earth does this mystical mumbo jumbo mean? Can we get it by deploying an ouija board, or by downing a glass and a half of ouzo?

Never mind. Sheehan in his own inimitable, self-satisfied, bourgeois way is at his most revealing when he talks of the art of life:

The meal table is the best setting for the art of life, the confluence of good food, good company, good drink and generosity.

Well at least until an attack of the gout sets you off about the way the Greeks are lazy. Then generosity flies out the window, and the confluences begin to sound more like dyspepsia, and the art of life a sourpuss raging.

Yep, the same man who babbles on about Greece laid low by its decadence, the following week can babble on as if born to the foodie manor.

Whenever Sheehan wanders down these kinds of alternative anti-capitalist paths, we're reminded of the acute contradictions in his belief systems, and in particular his contribution to the global warming debate (not to mention magic water).

We look forward - in the interest of an ongoing spiritual dining table at which we might all continue to sup - to his comment on the data presented by the National Climatic Data Center, at the U. S. Department of Commerce for April 2010, which you can find here.

No doubt Sheehan will be vastly relieved at the trend, which means that foods will grow in abundance, especially the precious corn needed by American combines for the production of high fructose corn syrup.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to Paddington to buy my thirteen buck loaf of bread, for the table. So exquisite, I'd be inclined to rhapsody if I only knew for sure that the wheat had been grown close by at Centennial Park ...