None of its high-profile proponents is a qualified dietician. The world they and their satellites and acolytes have built was post-fact before Trump. It is a world in which honey and dates are approved, but fruit - yes, fruit - can be cut out because of all the sugar it contains; a world in which butter, a substance that has been bringing calories and joy to humans since the dawn of our history without any noticeable detriment to our health, is bad; a world in which salt must be the "mineral-rich" pink-hued Himalayan kind.

Above all, it is a world in which this sentence - from Madeleine Shaw's Ready, Steady, Glow - is meant to be digestible. "Lettuce," she writes earnestly, "makes a great alternative to bread." The wellness guru's apocalyptic visions of distended guts trying to absorb glutenated carbs is nothing to the mental contortions the uninitiated reader must go through to take this in. And it is the psychical rather than physical effects of clean eating and the surrounding coconut-oil-is-the-new-chrism nonsense that most makes me hope that the closure of Ella's cafés foretells the end of the industry. Although it has always purported to be simply a way of making people more conscious of the dietary choices they make, for many of their followers, clean eating has always been a weight-loss diet by any other name.

"Wellness" simply substituted "slim" as the stated goal. But its audience, mainly women, all primed and adept at decoding euphemisms for what we are not supposed to (and, occasionally, genuinely shouldn't) want, knew what it was and what it meant. It gave a veneer of modernity and acceptability to the age-old process of putting fewer calories and less of the stuff you wanted in your mouth, in order to thin your thighs. And, as with any diet plan but especially one that advocates cutting out entire food groups and asserts the goodness/badness of particular properties without much in the way of scientific backing, it played effectively into the fears of people already prone to disordered eating.

The cracks were beginning to show in the wellness cult before Ella's cafés were shuttered, but it is probably background forces that will, ultimately, bring down the clean-eating gods. The energy, expense and wide-eyed belief it requires are a function of a calm, well-ordered and affluent society, which also allows the luxury of pomegranate-scattering self-indulgence. In a spiralised twist of fate, it may be that Brexit, Trump, a new Cold War looming and assorted other horrors have given us some real perspective back. Eat inorganically, drink anything but coldpressed wheatgrass, for tomorrow there's every chance something will kill us much quicker than cancer.

Now, please let me eat cake.