This is a bloody, brutal and necessary sacred cow hunt. Heston, Jamie, Gordon and the entire gruesome galère of monomial foodists are mocked, derided, exposed and forced to endure the echo of their vacuous "philosophies" and inane dicta. They are allowed so much rope that they suffer multiple deaths. Steven Poole shows about as much mercy as an abattoir shootist. Unlike such an operative, however, he is brilliantly and consistently and winningly funny: his is a great comic performance, and evidently hurtful. Or, rather, it would be hurtful were his multiple targets to possess his acuity and be able to understand what he writes. It's all too probable that they simply won't get it, they won't realise that they've been well and truly rumbled. And even if they dimly perceive that this man is taking multiple pots at them he can be discounted because he is not part of the guzzling "community" which listens only to its own because it is cultishly ingrown.

It is difficult, for instance, to imagine that such titans of contemporary thought as Prince Charles and Mr Sting will be dissuaded from their support for the Soil Association because one of its founders, Jorian Jenks, was a member of the English Mistery and British Union of Fascists: astonishingly, he continued to correspond after the second world war with the then imprisoned Richard Walther Darré, Reich minister of agriculture, the ideologue of blood and soil and "theorist" of Lebensraum. To point to Jenks's sources, beliefs and penpals is not an ad hominem criticism, for those beliefs remain at the very heart of this cranky, luddite and  as Poole makes clear  misanthropic organisation, which values mineral earth over humankind. Darré must be beaming with pride in whatever circle of wholemeal hell he inhabits. Poole correctly discerns a strong element of misanthropy and first world exclusivity throughout the entire bio and organic racket which, like any dumb religion (and is there any other kind?), puts reason to sleep in favour of dodgy nostrums with no bases other than those of "faith".

A hapless fellow called Craig Sams is quoted. He believes that meals become "imprinted on our DNA", that they become "part of your heredity". The book is littered with such professions of pseudoscience. But hold on: maybe Sams has a point, for it turns out that he is some sort of fair trade, holistic, ethical, carbon-sequestrating, cacao-growing, allotment-digging, tomato-avoiding macrobiotic entrepreneur. Could it be that his diet has so scrambled his brain that he has come to actually believe such guff? Or is Poole closer to the mark, and more forgiving, when he suggests that Sams's theory is a "marvellously subtle form of moral blackmail" for what you eat will affect not just you but "your as-yet-unborn children, who will inherit your disgustingly screwed-up beefy genome".

The personae whose wings Poole gleefully picks off belong to many and different gastronomic subcultures. They are nonetheless bound together by their extremism and their hyperbole. There is no place in these milieux for balance, for doubt, for self-questioning  let alone for the self-knowledge that might provide a bulwark against loopy mendacity ("if you cook these recipes, you will be rewarded with good times, brilliant weekends and big smiles all around the table"), against childish chemistry experiments, a wearily hackneyed lexicon ("drizzle", "source", "forage", "artisanal", "heritage", "proper", "real"), preposterous claims of provenance, grossly sentimental ancestor worship and the delusion that cooking is an art. It's not. It's at best a craft.

Attempts by persons of little learning to elevate it are risible. The sheer bollocks that chefs spout is startling. This is a caste drained of all irony, all wit. The chef Anthony Bourdain writes of the chef Thomas Keller: "You haven't seen how he handles fish, gently laying it down on the board and caressing it, approaching it warily, respectfully, as if communicating with an old friend." The old friend, should we not have noticed, is dead. Are we to suppose that Keller is a medium? Or is he a necrophiliac fish-fiddler, a Jimmy Savile of the deep? Rather bizarrely, Poole, succumbing momentarily to an injurious relativism, claims that Bourdain is "a serious, and seriously good, writer". Had "writer" been suffixed "for a chef" that contention would have been apter.

Still, it's a forgivable lapse given the sheer bathos that he is obliged to wade through. Virtually every page yields some startling sample of the food world's self-congratulation, its pompousness, its pretension, its sheer wrongheadedness. Franc Roddam, who invented MasterChef in 1990, claims ludicrously that "at that point good food was only for rich people. It was like, 'No hang on a second. Let's democratise this.'" So that's what he was up to, putting food on the poor's table by telecommunication. That "It was like" is, incidentally, a sexagenarian's priceless essay in the very "democratisaton" he is claiming for his debased telly format. Still, it cannot be denied that MasterChef has given us some glorious moments, such as this voiceover: "This is fine dining now, so Steve must remove the outer skin from each individual pea."

Any sentient adult will wince at the construction "fine dining". Poole is not afraid to quote stuff that will cause us to cringe. Us. For every us there is a them. Nor, it appears, is he afraid to court accusations of snobbery. Here is an intelligent, well read, highly educated man with a heightened sensitivity to language having a whale of a time poking fun at a brigade of tocqued unfortunates who are less intellectually favoured than he is, mostly sub-literate people who talk with their frying pans rather as footballers talk with their feet, people who are largely incapable of realising how absurd they appear to those who are not fellow believers.

Two hundred years ago, Steven Poole would have been an assiduous guide to the horrors of Bedlam. We should be thankful that in a more humane age the patients have been released and are now available to be gaped at in restaurants, magazines and on telly. All the time.