MY FRIEND Jeff refuses to eat fish, even though is he a prizewinning amateur carp fisherman. He won’t eat anything with pips in, either because they make him “feel weird”. Egg dishes fall into the same category, as they involve the small but apparently unacceptable risk of biting into a fragment of eggshell. “I could vomit just thinking about an eggshell,” he once told me, while pulling a face.

My other friend Aaron, meanwhile, will eat only fish. Then there is David, who won’t eat fish or meat — or, for that matter, pips or eggs. Indeed, anything that doesn’t involve white bread, tomato sauce or cheese, is pretty much out of bounds for David.

Yes, everyone is a fussy eater these days. The obvious culprit is California, where celebrity dieting whims are turned into gastronomic trends, but I suspect the blame lies much further north, at Starbucks’ HQ in Seattle. Starbucks, after all, can serve a cup of coffee 19,000 different ways, with five varieties of milk (whole, non-fat, “half & half”, organic and, of course, soy). The effect has been to escalate all food choice throughout America, and therefore the world.

According to America’s National Restaurant Association, 70 per cent of Starbucks-exposed diners now “customise” their orders. This figure is probably more than 100 per cent in Los Angeles, where patrons like to change their orders mid-meal.

Diners are now so used to choice they are unable to cope with menus. It makes me feel almost sorry for chefs. Ashley James, the British chef at the Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills, told me that in a former job he once prepared a new menu, only to receive an order from his first table for 14 Caesar salads. “I wasn’t even offering a Caesar salad,” recalled James, sadly.

I mention all this because of a dinner party my wife and I threw on Saturday, at which four of the guests (Jeff and Aaron among them) had contradictory dietary requirements. Heads were scratched, Martha Stewart recipes were consulted, and multiple dishes were prepared.

But the thought occurred to me that the modern dietary requirements of guests could soon make dinner parties impossible. The days when “DPers” would politely eat what was put in front of them are long gone. Hosts are now expected to cater for highly selective 21st-century palates, as well as to cook dishes that comply with socio-political beliefs, obscure religions and popular weight-loss programmes. It is getting too much. My friend Jade, for example, recently began an experimental diet, the aim of which is to eat only your four favourite foods — in Jade’s case, spinach, tofu, mango and cheeseburgers. This made social eating impossible.

Fussiness, of course, also extends to hygiene. Diners are now used to seeing their food being handled by chefs with hairnets and clear plastic gloves. In Los Angeles, restaurants even have official ratings based on the cleanliness of their kitchens, starting with A and ending with a roach-infested C. By law, restaurants must display the rating at their entrance.

It can come as a bit of culture shock, therefore, to visit a friend’s unrated kitchen, where raw meat is being prepared with unwashed hands as pets scurry about underfoot.

In Beverly Hills, the dinner party is already dying out. Residents instead rely on a company called Gourmet Courier, which hands out a booklet of menus from some of the area’s fanciest restaurants, then delivers anything you want for a hefty mark-up. It is ideal for DPs: guests get what they want, hosts avoid having to prepare multiple dishes and everything is hygienically prepared.

In the interest of research, I ordered a cheeseburger from Gourmet Courier. It arrived 45 minutes later in a BMW 7-series, driven by a svelte blonde waitress/model in a fur coat. The price? A mere $45 (£26). That means a three-course meal for 12 guests, including nibbles and booze, would probably come to about $2,000.

It’s enough to put you off your food.

• PERHAPS Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, should intervene in the fussy eating trend.

  The whole point of a dinner party, after all, is to show off your unaffordable home to friends before rising interest rates force you to rent it out and move into your car. Without DPs, no one will want to buy houses any more, and the market will crash, taking the entire US economy with it. And all because the likes of Jeff get squeamish about eggshells.

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