Consider the Fork: How Technology Transforms the Way We Cook and Eat

by Bee Wilson

The Dowayo people of Cameroon in Africa have special forms of pottery for different people (a child’s bowl would look different from one belonging to a widow) and there are taboos against eating from another person’s designated food pot.

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‘Jomon’ comes from the Japanese, and means ‘cord-marked’.

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sweet fleshy source of calcium, phosphorus and vitamin C (though little protein).

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like the Battersea cauldron in the British Museum, a splendid Iron Age specimen from 800–700 BC, which was pulled out of the River Thames in the nineteenth century.

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metal pan has survived from Roman Britain with concentric rings in its base, whose purpose, it seems, was to create slow, steady heat distribution. Experiments with

For an anthropologist of China, E. N. Anderson, the tou exemplifies the principle of ‘minimax’: maximum value from minimum cost and effort.