Word-goo of this sort creeps in everywhere. One of his favorite books is assessed this way: “I found his writing compelling and the photos full of striking colors.” Items on one’s plate are “foodstuffs.”

You sense in almost every chapter that he’s stretching thin material. Thus the ponderous detours into much-trampled areas like the history of barbecue, the varieties of Chinese food and how to choose kitchen equipment. Truisms are sprinkled like whatever the opposite of salt is. “Barbecue restaurants often have idiosyncratic names,” he announces, to aliens I suppose. “Like Bubba’s.”

Mr. Cowen presents the wisdom of the ages as if it were a series of dispatches from the gastronomic front lines. To find good food and not get fleeced, he recommends, leave the city centers and seek marginal areas. Mr. Trillin has been saying this for at least 40 years. I suspect Thucydides preferred the little joint on a side street to the place with the fountains where the waiters peeled customers’ grapes.

Speaking of Mr. Trillin, this book makes reference to the kind of ostentatious restaurants he used to jokingly refer to as “La Maison de la Casa House.” Mr. Cowen quotes his patron saint incorrectly, replacing “House” with “Haus.” Not a big deal. Except that this mistake arrives on Page 2, rattling your confidence.

Mr. Cowen later writes, “Google brings up over a million mentions for ‘tofu fajitas.’ ” That sounds crazy, so you check it. It turns out that Google offers only about 30,000 mentions of “tofu fajitas”; giving it a wider search range (without quotation marks) brings it up to about 115,000. Confidence further rattled.

Deep down there’s nothing foodies loathe more than other foodies. Mr. Cowen’s prose is animated by his dislike of sanctimonious, more-organic-than-thou types — the foodie liberal elite — but his book is its own elaborate exercise in conspicuous consumption and reverse snobbery. He flies around the globe, eats at the most expensive restaurants and sneers at nearly all of them.