A friend recently attended an official lunch at Buckingham Palace, where he chatted to the queen, who mentioned that Prince Philip spent much of his spare time watching food programs.

Amid this gastronomic obsession at all levels of society, a new book appears this week that posits that food has replaced drugs as the "last ingestible substance that you can indulge in with fanatical obsessiveness without being frowned on by society."

"You...