Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat

Bee Wilson

oct 2012 · Penguin UK

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Bee Wilson is the food writer and historian who writes as the 'Kitchen Thinker' in the Sunday Telegraph, and is the author of Swindled!. Her charming and original new book, Consider the Fork, explores how the implements we use in the kitchen have shaped the way we cook and live.

A wooden spoon - most trusty and loveable of kitchen implements - looks like the opposite of 'technology', as the word is normally understood. But look closer. Is it oval or round? Does it have an extra-long handle to give your hand a place of greater safety from a hot skillet? Or a pointy bit at one side to get the lumpy bits in the corner of the pan? It took countless inventions to get to the well-equipped kitchens we have now, where our old low-tech spoon is joined by mixers, freezers and microwaves, but the story of human invention in the kitchen is largely unseen. Discovering the histories of our knives, ovens and kitchens themselves, Bee Wilson explores, among many other things, why the French and Chinese have such different cultures of the knife; and why Roman kitchens contain so many implements we recognize. Encompassing inventors, scientists, cooks and chefs, this is the previously unsung history of our kitchens.

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Bee Wilson is a British food writer and historian. She writes a weekly food column in The Sunday Telegraph's Stella magazine, for which she has three times been named the Guild of Food Writers food journalist of the year. She has also contributed to The Sunday Times, the TLS, the New Yorker and the London Review of Books. She is the author of previous two books, The Hive: The Story of the Honeybee and Us (2004) and Swindled: From Poison Sweets to Counterfeit Coffee, the Dark History of the Food Cheats (2008), a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week.