Books After a brief academic career as a
research fellow in the history of ideas at
St John's College, Cambridge, Wilson began writing a series of books linking food with wider themes of health, psychology and history. In 2005, she published her first book:
The Hive: the Story of the Honeybee and Us published by
John Murray.
The Independent called it a "sprightly hymn to the honeybee". It examined the human relationship with honeybees and the way in which the beehive has been used as a metaphor for human models of work, love, politics and life. It also included honey-based recipes. Wilson's next book, in 2008, was
Swindled: From Poison Sweets to Counterfeit Coffee – The Dark History of the Food Cheats. This was a history of food fraud from ancient times to the present day. This was followed, in 2012, by
Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat. This was a history of kitchen technologies, from fire to ice, from pots and pans to knives; to the spork. It has been translated into Spanish, German, Italian, Korean and Portuguese. Wilson's publisher,
Basic Books explains that "Technology in the kitchen does not just mean the Pacojets and sous-vide machines of the modern kitchen, but also the humbler tools of everyday cooking and eating: a wooden spoon and a skillet, chopsticks and forks". In 2016, Wilson's book
First Bite: How We Learn to Eat was a change of direction. It was the first of Wilson's books to address the practical psychology of eating rather than the history of food. Its main thesis is that human food habits are learned, from childhood onwards, and that they can also be relearned or unlearned at any age. "The wonderful secret of being an omnivore is that we can adjust our desires, even late in the game."
First Bite won the Special Commendation Award at the Andre Simon Food and Drink Awards and Food Book of the Year at the
Fortnum & Mason Food and Drink Awards. That book was described in the
Financial Times as being "about the pleasure of eating and how we can reconnect with this". In 2020, her book
The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change won Food Book of the Year at the Fortnum and Mason Food and Drink Awards. In 2020,
The Bookseller reported that Wilson was writing her first cookbook,
The Secret of Cooking.
Journalism Alongside writing books, Wilson has also been a prolific journalist, mostly writing about food but sometimes covering other subjects such as film, biography, music and history. For five years from 1998, Wilson was the weekly food critic of the
New Statesman magazine, where she wrote about subjects including school meals, the history of food and ingredients such as vanilla, tinned tomatoes, melons and butter. After that, Wilson wrote the "Kitchen Thinker" column in
The Sunday Telegraphs "Stella" magazine for twelve years. For the column, she was named the
Guild of Food Writers food journalist of the year in 2004, 2008 and 2009. Wilson has written book reviews and other articles for
The Guardian,
The Sunday Times and
The Times Literary Supplement. She has written "Page Turner" blogs for
The New Yorker on ideas about the recipe. She has contributed articles to the
London Review of Books on subjects such as film, biography, history and music, as well as the history of the restaurant in London. She has written a series of "Long Reads" for
The Guardian on subjects ranging from clean eating to
ultra-processed food to the history of the British curryhouse. == Other activities ==