Bee Wilson

Beatrice Dorothy "Bee" Wilson, Viscountess Runciman of Doxford (born 7 March 1974) is a British food writer, journalist and historian and the author of six books on food-related subjects.

Plenary chair at the Oxford Food Symposium

Biography

Wilson is the daughter of the writer A.N. Wilson and the academic Katherine Duncan-Jones. Her sister is the classicist Emily Wilson. She attended Trinity College, Cambridge,[1] and it was from Cambridge University that she received her doctorate for a dissertation on early French utopian socialism.[2]

For five years from 1998, Wilson was the food critic of the New Statesman magazine, where she wrote about subjects such as school meals.[3]

After that, Wilson wrote the "Kitchen Thinker" column in The Sunday Telegraph's "Stella" magazine for twelve years.[4] For the column, she was named the Guild of Food Writers food journalist of the year in 2004, 2008 and 2009.[5]

Wilson has written book reviews and other articles for The Guardian, The Sunday Times and The Times Literary Supplement.[6][7] She has written "Page Turner" blogs for The New Yorker on ideas about the recipe.[8][9] She has contributed articles to the London Review of Books, on subjects such as film, biography, history and music.[10]

In 2016, her book First Bite: How We Learn to Eat won the Special Commendation Award at the Andre Simon Food and Drink Awards[11] and Food Book of the Year at the Fortnum & Mason Food and Drink Awards.[12] That book was described in the Financial Times as being "about the pleasure of eating and how we can reconnect with this".[13]

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 [14]

Wilson was the chair of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery from 2015-2017.[15] [16]

In 2019, Wilson co-founded a U.K. food education charity, TastEd, which describes itself as working 'to give every child the opportunity to experience the joy of fresh vegetables and fruits'.[17] TastEd (short for Taste Education) is part of the Sapere network of food education which is used in a number of countries including Finland, Sweden and France and which 'was created out of the conviction that taste education is good for health'.[18]

Reception

Writing in The Financial Times, Wendell Steavenson described Bee Wilson's 2019 book The Way We Eat Now as 'clear and vital reading...an authoritative and brilliantly compelling description of the economic, political and emotional issues around our food'.Steavenson, Wendell. "'The way we eat now by Bee Wilson - quantity of quality'". The Financial Times. Retrieved 23 August 2020.

According to The New Yorker writer Jane Kramer, "Bee Wilson describes herself as a food writer. That's half the story". In Kramer's opinion, Wilson writes on food as it relates to history, ideas and human life.[19] In The New York Times, Dawn Drzal described Wilson as "a congenial kitchen oracle".[20]

Works
  • The Hive: The Story of the Honeybee and Us, John Murray, 2004
  • Swindled: From Poison Sweets to Counterfeit Coffee, John Murray and Princeton University Press, 2008
  • Sandwich: A Global History, Reaktion Books, 2010
  • Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat, Basic Books, 2012 (history of kitchen technology, from fire to the AeroPress)[21]
Translated into Spanish as La importancia del tenedor. Historia, inventos y artilugios en la cocina, Turner, 2013
  • First Bite: How We Learn to Eat, Basic Books and Fourth Estate[22]
Translated into Spanish as El primer bocado. Cómo aprendemos a comer, Turner, 2016
  • The Way We Eat Now. Strategies for eating in a world of change., Harper Collins, 2019
Published in the US as The Way We Eat Now: How the Food Revolution Has Transformed Our Lives, Our Bodies, and Our World, Basic Books, 2019

References
  1. "Dr Bee Wilson (1992)". Alumni Profiles. Trinity College, Cambridge. Retrieved 10 April 2018.
  2. Raymond Sokolov. "Back to the Chopping Board". Consider the Fork: A History of Invention in the Kitchen (book review). Literary Review, London. Retrieved 10 April 2018.
  3. Bee Wilson "Food", New Statesman, 17 March 2002
  4. "Telegraph website". Retrieved 5 October 2015.
  5. "Guild of Food Writers". Gfw.co.uk. Archived from the original on 25 March 2009. Retrieved 27 July 2009.
  6. Bee Wilson, Bee "The Baguette is Back", Times Literary Supplement, 6 June 2007
  7. Bee Wilson "Smell the Coffee", Times Literary Supplement, 31 October 2007
  8. Wilson, Bee. "Pleasures of the Literary Meal". The New Yorker. Retrieved 5 October 2015.
  9. Wilson, Bee. "The Allure of Imagined Meals". The New Yorker. Retrieved 5 October 2015.
  10. London Review of Books. "Bee Wilson". London Review of Books. Retrieved 5 October 2015.
  11. "2015 Awards: Food". Andre Simon. Retrieved 5 July 2016.
  12. "Food and Drink Awards 2017". Fortnum and Mason. Retrieved 5 July 2016.
  13. Russell, Polly. "First Bite: How We Learn to Eat by Bee Wilson". Financial Times. Retrieved 5 July 2016.
  14. "Hot Dinners Blog". Retrieved 23 August 2020.
  15. Duguid, Naomi. "Report on the Oxford Symposium 2015". Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. Retrieved 5 October 2015.
  16. Oxford Food Symposium https://www.oxfordsymposium.org.uk/2017-food-landscape/. Retrieved 23 August 2020. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  17. TastEd https://www.tasteeducation.com/. Retrieved 23 August 2020. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  18. Sapere Association https://www.sapere-association.com/. Retrieved 23 August 2020. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  19. Kramer, Jane (18 March 2013). "A Fork of One's Own". The New Yorker.
  20. Drzal, Dawn. "The Science of Sizzle". Retrieved 5 October 2015.
  21. Poole, Steven. "Consider the Fork Review". The Guardian. Retrieved 5 October 2015.
  22. Finney, Clare. "It's Not Naughty. It's Not Virtuous. It's Food". Borough Market. Archived from the original on 6 October 2015. "We don't have an instinct that tells us what to eat... It's not a moral thing. It's a skill we learn".
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