Book Review: Consider the Fork by Bee Wilson

One of the few constants across the amazing variety of human culture since the dawn of time is eating. We all eat, sometimes more and sometimes less. What we eat varies wildly depending on location, accessibility, and wealth. Three meals a day — spaced out at regular intervals — is a wonderful, modern invention based on copious supplies of food, available year-round. How else can you enjoy fresh strawberries in December, fresh apples in April, or fresh lettuce in August? Or for that matter, fresh eggs in February. True seasonal eating is, by its very nature, limiting.

So. We all eat. What we choose to eat, how we cook it, and the utensils we use can vary hugely depending on our culture. While none of us would dream of eating without forks today (unless we use chopsticks), somebody had to think of a fork and invent one. Someone had to figure out how to make a container in which to boil water and then make pottage and then cook otherwise inedible grain into gruel. That’s after someone figured out how to make fire reliably and control the flame.

Similarly, someone had to look at that bag of salty snot sitting inside an ashtray and say “hey, that looks delicious. We’ll call them oysters.” Whatever we eat today, wherever we are in the world, someone had to go first, hopefully not poisoning themselves along the way. Over time, our ancestors refined what they ate, how they cooked it, and then they used what and how they ate as cultural markers to say “this is us” and “those savages who eat that funny-looking, evil-smelling stuff are not us.”

Thus today, we have an entire world of foods and cooking styles to choose from. We are not limited to what bits are locally available, in season or carefully preserved, that our great-grandmothers ate.

Douglas Adams said it best: “The history of every major galactic civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Enquiry, and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question ‘How can we eat?’, the second by the question ‘Why do we eat?’, and the third by the question ‘Where should we have lunch?’”

Bee Wilson’s Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat is concerned with all three of those questions. She begins with the evolution of pots and pans. Did you know that a Roman set of cookware isn’t very different from what we use today? I didn’t. An entire chapter is devoted to knives and their use at tables. Ever thought of why table knives are so terribly dull? Because prior to the invention of sets of flatware, every diner used his or her own knife, razor-sharp, and used for other things as well. Table knives were deliberately dull since they weren’t supposed to be used to stab other dinner guests, no matter how much you wanted to. Dull table knives are a safety feature.

Ms. Wilson addresses the use of fire and devotes pages to the English history of roasting just about everything over huge fires. Why did the English specialize in roasting? Because they had an abundance of two things: a huge variety of animals and plenty of wood to burn. Why don’t the Chinese roast everything? Not as many animals and a severe, chronic, unrelenting scarcity of fuel to use for roasting.

How do we measure our ingredients? By weight or by volume? Both have their problems. How do we show our wealth by what we eat? If you’re rich, you eat out of season and you eat things that show you can afford to pay someone to slave in that kitchen for hours. How do we preserve food so it can be eaten out of season? More importantly, how do we preserve food so it can be eaten when there is nothing much available. Any culture that has to deal with winter and agriculture has to manage “the thin time.” That’s the season of late winter to early spring when nothing grows and you’re eating whatever you stored up during the bounty of the summer and fall harvests.

You get very hungry during the thin time. That’s why, historically, rich people carried some fat. They could afford to eat when other, poorer people could not. Today, being tanned and scrawny is a sign of wealth and self-control. Scrawniness used to be a sure marker of poverty and being tanned meant you slaved in the fields all day.

Ms. Wilson also goes into some detail on certain, selected kitchen items: rice cookers, mezzalunas, tongs, molds, and the like.

It’s a terrific, readable history of what and why we eat. Its focus is primarily on the Western world, which is understandable since Ms. Wilson is British and not Thai. There are plenty of great, historical details that could be very useful to historical fiction writers. If your opus is set in 16th century Wales, your characters are going to be roasting almost everything they’re eating. 16th century China? Nope, completely different style of cooking and eating and wildly different ingredients.

But there is one problem with the book. It needs pictures. Lots and lots of pictures. Ms. Wilson describes many, many kitchen objects but let’s face it, a picture is worth a thousand words. There are tasteful line drawings scattered here and there in the text. They are not always identified, nor is it always clear how that mysterious object is being used.

This book needs pictures and plenty of them. It is not a cookbook, by the way, so it does not come with recipes. Recipes are easy enough to find but a good picture of the clockwork mechanism on a roasting spit is not that easy to locate.

Other than the lack of pictures (in the next edition, please!), this is a great addition to your reading list. Ms. Wilson has written other books about food and eating so if you like Consider the Fork, you may want to peruse those titles.

Visit the Consider the Fork website.