If there is a more distinguished food writer than Beatrice Dorothy (‘Bee’) Wilson, I haven’t met her (or him). Prizes have festooned Wilson’s dynamic career through just about all the top places in higher journalism, and her earlier books on food fakery and honey (Bee on bees) showed her to be a dab hand at science and history. This was no surprise to those happy few who had read her Cambridge PhD dissertation on early French utopian socialism, although the bee book may have owed its origin more to a whimsical sense of her nickname than to her research on Fourier’s theories about hive-like collaboration among humans.

Neither multiple motherhood nor the approaching end of her fourth decade seems to have slowed her down, although this latest book, Consider the Fork, might sound like a retreat to the hob. The title is misleading in several ways. Wilson ranges far beyond the kitchen, to the table and on