The gourmand who spends his holiday combing Brooklyn for the best slice of pizza. The vegetarian who purchases only the organic kale from a local biodynamic farm at her weekly food market. The home cook who devotes years of his life to perfecting complicated, multi-step recipes for croissants, or ketchup, or sourdough bread.

Do you know these people? Are you these people? Do you think about food, all the time? Do you care where it came from and who made it or grew it or killed it, and how? Do you read the blogposts and the restaurant reviews and the culinary magazines? Do you derive meaning from eating?

If so, chances are you are an adherent of one kind or another worshipping at the altar of food. Food's various gospels are spreading like wildfire across the small segment of humanity wealthy enough to care about what we put in our bodies and to endow it with a significance greater than mere fuel. We privileged few have exalted food to a transcendent position, and have made of it something holy. We create idols out of chefs. We make pilgrimages to the great restaurants. We commune, we perform rituals, we pore over holy texts, we proselytise. We celebrate and sacrifice. And of course, we make war.

Think I'm being flippant, clever, blasphemous, worse? I'm not. I was a true believer once, too. An acolyte. Maybe even a fundamentalist. But then I fell. I was expelled from the congregation of the worthy. I want nothing but to believe, to worship again, to be let back in. But it's not going to happen.

Born, and born-again

Danville, Illinois, circa 1983. A Ponderosa Steakhouse, one of a chain of mid-priced restaurants stretching across the American Midwest, their uniformity part of what draws people to them: the vinyl booths, the wrung-out waitresses. My family, as then constituted – mother, sister, baby brother – gathered for an inexpensive dinner and a few hours of respite from our house during another divorce.

We bickered, we threw things, we spilled our drinks, we did our homework – and we ate. Iceberg lettuce drowned in ranch dressing. Grey steak. Baked potatoes heaped with sour cream. Flaccid broccoli awash in margarine and salt.

That was dinner. That was food in the vast, fertile breadbasket of America of the 80s: pale, overcooked, and bland, bland, bland. Meat and potatoes. Casseroles. Vegetables boiled to nutritional obsolescence. Cupboard snacks of nuclear cheese and fruit leather. Everything maximally processed and minimally nutritious. We ate without thought, without intention, simply to feed our bodies and derive the predictable comforts that fat and sugar provide.

This was how I learned to eat. And this is how I would have continued to eat, and live, and die, in ignorance of true flavour and the sophisticated pleasures of eating. But change was coming.

I came of age in the 1990s, a time that roughly coincided with a rebirth of interest in eating as a pastime. Eating as something novel, thoughtful, purposeful. Local food, slow food, artisanal food. Ethnic food. Fusions. Sushi. The popularisation of the Michelin star.

I ate Indian food for the first time at college. I moved to Chicago and tried Greek and German and Ethiopian food. I moved to California and had real enchiladas and tamales. Around that time microbreweries were expanding their reach. Artisanal coffee was moving from the margins to the mainstream. These were among the first of an onslaught of food trends that now sweep the nation every year.

I moved to New York in 2003. In New York every meal can be an adventure: from the finest restaurants to the daily street markets to the carts on the corners to the bodegas lining every block. From unlicensed pop-up restaurants in Brooklyn to mysterious diners in Queens where the only menus are printed in Hindi and you order by pointing at pictures on the wall. From food trucks parked at the edge of soccer fields to restaurants at the top of the most beautiful buildings in the world.

And the people! Above all the people, who cannot stop talking, thinking, arguing and scheming about food. Have you tried the tacos at the new food truck on Columbus Avenue, did you get a table at the new Korean BBQ in NoLiTa, do you know someone who knows someone who has the phone number for the secret bar located at the back of the Chinese restaurant on St Mark's? They plot and dream, they eat and drink, they elevate and dismiss, and then they wake up the next day and do it all over again.

And I was right there with them. Food was a revelation. I explored and studied and tasted and learned how to judge. Eating became a way to know myself, my preferences and the limits of my adventurousness. I became that most irritating but apt of designations – a foodie. I was in heaven.

The fall

The intestinal pain began in my mid-20s. It was mild at first, and intermittent, becoming acute after particularly large meals. My doctor diagnosed a wonky gall bladder, warned I might eventually have to have it removed. After particularly large meals I might have a night of grinding pain. I tried, half-heartedly, to cut down on the fat. It didn't help.

The final blow came after a year in Italy. A year of eating some of the most impossibly delicious food in the world, every day. I came back a wreck. I saw doctors, specialists, had rounds of tests. They could find nothing physically wrong with me.

Finally, one doctor uttered the fatal words: "Have you tried giving up gluten?"

Two weeks later, it was over. Years of pain and discomfort, gone. A long-standing propensity for head colds vanished. My mind felt clearer, my body 10 years younger. A troubling weakness on my right side disappeared.

What else disappeared? Bagels, croissants, sandwiches. Cakes and cookies and pie. Flour tortillas. Beer – my God, beer was gone! Soy sauce, gone, and therefore most Asian food. Fish and chips. Onion rings. All fried food, in fact. Naan bread. Sauces. Chowder. My wife's homemade fettuccini, perfected during that year in Italy. Southern biscuits drowning in sausage gravy. Perfectly poached eggs benedict on top of crispy, buttery rings of English muffin.

All gone. And the life that I knew was over.

Cleansing of the temple

I fully accept that what I'm saying may sound overdramatic. For billions of people, deprivation is a constant, and food a daily question – not "what" or "when", but "if". And to someone who hasn't experienced the onset of a food restriction, to someone who rolls his eyes at a gluten intolerance, to someone who hasn't had a rich and adventurous eating life suddenly taken away, all this might sound unnecessary and in bad taste.

But I didn't just lose beer and bread.

Sugarloaf Key, Florida. 1987. A church built around slash pine and mangroves. My stepfather, a lifelong Lutheran, has dragged us here, his wife and her three kids, every Sunday for our mutual edification. What a struggle: to dress, to eat, to arrive on time. It's enough to ensure, as we enter to praise God for his patience, that no one on Earth much likes each other.

I never want to go. It's fraught, it's boring. It might even be a scam.

But today is different. Today I don't mind the hard pew. I follow the preacher's sermon. Something clicks into place for me, and I sort of get it: the kind faces, the warm greetings, the growing familiarity of the rituals. The consolations of the tribe. I feel embraced, at home.

As a young person, I took solace in church and a belief in God. Then, in college, scepticism prevailed, and I put away childish things. But because I had grown up among a community of believers, enjoying the believer's quiver of comforts, I gazed with envy at friends of mine who had retained their faith. They enjoyed old, familiar customs. Divine reassurances. A built-in community of the like-minded. If I judged belief to be infantilising and superstitious, a commitment to atheism looked awfully lonely.

There's a simplistic view that everyone in America believes in God. We're a church-going, Bible-thumping, original-sin-loving, backward-thinking people whose talk with angels and belief in a guiding hand make us reason-free fanatics. But that's to forget entirely about the substantial number of secular humanists present in every state of the union.

It's also to forget about what I'd called ambivalent secularists – people like me who have a hard time disowning God entirely.

Without God, what do we do?

We find other gods.

Losing my nutrition

Brooklyn, New York, circa 2004. Under the Brooklyn bridge, near the cobblestone streets of Dumbo. The queue outside the unassuming store front with the plastic red awning stretches almost to the corner. Inside, the place is packed. Framed pictures of Frank Sinatra and Robert De Niro crowd the walls. This is Grimaldi's, the most consistently excellent pizza in the world. Crust thin as paper, a coating of rich red tomato sauce, mozzarella browned and blistered to perfection, and a cavalier toss of basil leaves.

The old me, the glutenous guy, was a seeker, a pilgrim, a mystic, a Gnostic. I went to extraordinary lengths to find Grimaldi's. Gino's, in Chicago, was thick-crust perfection, but Gino's was nothing compared with Pizzeria Regina in Boston's North End. And Pizzeria Regina had nothing on Di Fara in Brooklyn's Midwood neighbourhood. And none of them held a candle to Grimaldi's.

When I abandoned church, I found brunch. I gave up congregants for dinner companions. We made treks to all the boroughs for obscure ethnic delicacies and went broke on tasting menus. We sought out haggis and pakoras, the most talked-about doughnuts, the steak insiders whispered about. By the time I discovered my gluten allergy, I'd found a secular answer to the mystical delights and comforts of ritual denied me when I gave up God.

Then I became sick, and was forced, suddenly, to stop seeking. More often than not, the object of the search was harmful to me. In restaurants I was reduced to asking mincing, humiliating questions. Do you have gluten-free vodka? Is there flour in that sauce? Can you bring the hamburger without a bun? I had to endure the scepticism of bartenders, the confusion of waitresses, the patient forbearance of my dining companions as we scanned the menu to be sure there was something I could eat.

I now looked at other eaters and envied their uncomplicated relationship to food as I once envied my Catholic and Jewish friends at college. It was a much profounder alienation than I might have anticipated, a loneliness of mind and body in the midst of so much happy, uncomplicated communion. When, a few months ago, I received a gift certificate from my father to one of the city's high-end restaurants, complete with a tasting menu of humanely raised and locally sourced ingredients, I was told by the reservationist that they would make no attempt to accommodate my allergy and that I was better off not coming. At my encouragement, my wife and friends, my co-religionists, went without me.

A foodie who wants to stay at home is like the churchgoer who, seized with doubt, sits out Christmas mass. He's lost his faith, his sustenance, his communion with the like-minded, and his nights are long and dark.

Factions

My religious attitude toward food, the searching out of higher and higher levels of truth and goodness with the hope I might one day ascend to heaven, never had a moral or ethical dimension. Or if it did, it was an antinomian one, one that forgave a lack of virtue in the name of epicurean delight.

The professional-amateur home chef is a similar seeker. In his expenditure of time, his priestly preparations, and his pursuit of a platonic ideal, he is in direct, near-mystical communion with something bigger than himself, something nobler and better than the known world.

Others use food to direct and centre their moral lives. There is the sustainable-farming movement, the organic movement, the locavore movement. Some people abstain from certain food in a similar vein: everything the vegetarian doesn't eat elevates food to a spiritual level. Our virtue or our good taste – these are our contemporary urban scriptures.

They often force us to choose sides. Are you a vegan or an epicure? An eater of fast foods or a slow-food devotee? A Soylent guzzler or a Goop advocate? There's more at stake than mere taste.

In stark contrast to the ever-searching omnivore, the vegetarian and the locavore have elected a life devoted to ending animal suffering and maintaining ecological sustainability. They combine the virtues of monkish asceticism with the holy righteousness of a fundamentalist. But perhaps they could best be understood as some variety of born-again: they have elected their diet and believe others should, too.

And then there are those who eat and drink only organic. It's no mystery why. We live in a world where "all natural" can mean processed, where "multigrain" can mean Cheerios and pizza crust, where "sugar-free" can be loaded with fat and "fat-free" loaded with sugar. The organic eater is on a crusade to rid the body of impurities – chemicals, additives, hormones, antibodies and genetically modified organisms. It's similar to ridding the mind of empty and useless thoughts – a Zen enterprise, the purge toward a nutritional nirvana. To eat right is to find one's true self amid the weak and false man-made world.

Others seek the assurances of immortality. The calorie-restriction diet. The Paleo diet. Nutritarians. Follow their various bibles and you may live to be 120 years old. And who doesn't want that?

The paleolithic diet's main advocate is Mark Sisson, who runs a website called Mark's Daily Apple. He's one of hundreds of gurus, nutritionistas and foodologists advising, proselytising, exhorting us from a variety of media platforms. There's also Dr Oz, the TV personality, whose daily talk show makes eternal good health seem within reach of us all. There's Gwyneth Paltrow who elevates, via her Goop website, the healthy-living lifestyle into a series of sacred tenets. And there's Dr Mercola, a divisive figure and seller of nutritional supplements who writes with textbook specificity on right eating. Give yourself over to any one of them and they will help you do many things. Burn fat. Eliminate toxins. Boost energy. Curb obesity. Reverse disease. Prevent ageing. Live right. Never die. It's better than a trip to the holy waters.

Forced conversion

Manhattan grocery store, 2014. The gluten-free aisle. One disorganised silver rack dedicated to foods for the fallen. I call it the charity section. The panko flakes. The wasabi rice crunch crackers. The quinoa pasta.

I've been told that there's never been a better time to have a gluten intolerance. The problem is real and the manufacturers have responded. The aisles are full of alternatives. Yet it's all I can do to drag myself over here while my wife buys flour tortillas and a freshly baked baguette. It's all I can do most nights to lift the fork to my mouth.

The luxury of eating for moral reasons is lost to me now. I have to eat certain things just to sustain myself. Not that I was ever tempted to go restrictive. Now that I've been denied a wide swath of delicious foods, I'm more perplexed than ever before by someone willingly denying himself pleasurable foods on principle. "Eat, man!" I want to cry. Eat it all lest it be taken from you!

As for my old pilgrimages to far-flung restaurants, my endless search for divinity on a plate, that's all over, too. There is no more Grimaldi's in my future, no more 12-course tasting menus giving me some intimation of the divine. I must resign myself to rice spirals and faux buns now, just as I once had to learn to accept the loss of comfort and community when I gave up my faith in God. Who knows, maybe something good will come of it. Some hard-fought wisdom. Some solace. I sort of doubt it. But then, God works in mysterious ways.

Know your food tribes

Coeliac Someone allergic to wheat and forbidden from consuming bread, pasta, and beer – and thus dead inside.

Flexitarian Vegetarians whose principles collapse at the sight of a cheeseburger.

Locovore Environmentally sensitive individual who would sooner gnaw on a raw beet from the backyard than sink their teeth into a luscious kiwi flown in from New Zealand.

Nutritionista A fit and knowledgable woman whose lifestyle of healthy eating glamorises inedible things like kale, tofu and brown-rice pastas.

Restrictor An ascetic existing on a low-calorie diet in the belief that it will add years to his life – miserable years spent feeling hungry and irritable.

Slow Foodie Someone who so abhors the culture of fast food that her life is quickly consumed by a 24-hour devotion to preparing homemade food.

Soylenite A practical individual so immune to the pleasures of food that he will willingly consume a beverage with the taste and consistency of mucus so long as it provides an unfussy meal with the minimum daily nutritional requirements.

Vegan Someone who has made friends with the mighty bean.

• Joshua Ferris's new novel, To Rise Again At A Decent Hour, is published by Viking at £16.99. To order a copy for £13.59, with free mainland UK p&p, go to guardianbookshop.co.uk.