Oorspronkelijke titel: The Hive. The Story of the Honeybees And Us (2004)
Vertaling uit het Engels: Nico Groen. Vertaling van dichtregels: Jos Versteegen
Met noten, bibliografie en register

In deze vermakelijke cultuurgeschiedenis vertelt Bee Wilson wat de mens door de eeuwen heen over de bij heeft willen geloven. Ze citeert filosofen, biologen, kunstenaars, schrijvers en bijenhouders over het meest veelzijdige schepsel uit het dierenrijk. Bovendien trakteert ze de lezer op recepten.

Beatrice Dorothy "Bee" Wilson FRSL is a British food writer and journalist. She writes the "Table Talk" column for The Wall Street Journal, and is also a campaigner for food education through the charity TastEd.
Beatrice Dorothy Wilson is the daughter of the writer A. N. Wilson and the academic Katherine Duncan-Jones. Her sister is the classicist Emily Wilson. She has said that she learned how to cook sitting at the kitchen table, reading her mother's cookbooks, starting with The Penguin Cookery Book.
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.[citation needed]

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.[citation needed]

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[11] 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.
(Wikipedia)

cultuurgeschiedenis