"Consider the Fork," by Bee Wilson Illustration by Kelly Blair Which comes first, the stir-fry or the wok? It may sound like a bad joke, but the answer holds the key to one of the world's great cuisines. Bee Wilson's supple, sometimes playful style in "Consider the Fork," a history of the tools and techniques humans have invented to feed themselves, cleverly disguises her erudition in fields from archaeology and anthropology to food science. Only when you find yourself rattling off statistics at the dinner table will you realize how much information you've effortlessly absorbed. Wilson, an award-winning British food journalist and historian who contributes the "Kitchen Thinker" column to The Sunday Telegraph, is also, incidentally, the daughter of the biographer and novelist A. N. Wilson. Her fourth book (following histories of beekeeping, food scandals and the sandwich) proves she belongs in the company of Jane Grigson, one of the grandes dames of English food writing. Like Grigson's, Wilson's insouciant scholarship and companionable voice convince you she would be great fun to spend time with in the kitchen. So, which does come first, the stir-fry or the wok? Wilson's answer is, "Neither." To solve the riddle, we have to take a step back and contemplate cooking fuel: firewood was scarce, and with a wok you could cook more quickly after chopping food into bite-size morsels with a tou, or Chinese cleaver. Chopsticks were also part of this "symbiosis." The Japanese (who adopted chopsticks from the Chinese) had a different problem. Because of Shinto taboos about contamination, they would no more eat with a stranger's chopsticks, even if washed, than they would borrow his underwear. Therefore, at the beginning of the 18th century, they invented waribashi, those disposable chopsticks, joined at the top, you see today in so many Asian restaurants. Unfortunately, waribashi precipitated an ecological disaster. The Japanese use and discard 23 billion pairs a year, which is bad enough, but the Chinese have now taken up the custom and produce 63 billion pairs annually. This vast consumption has resulted in a shortage of appropriate wood in China akin, at least spiritually, to the one that originally gave rise to the invention of chopsticks thousands of years ago. In the ultimate irony, China, Japan and Korea now import chopsticks from a manufacturing plant in Georgia, stamped "Made in U.S.A." The British, on the other hand, with their abundance of firewood, went in for enormous haunches of beef spit-roasted in front of a roaring hearth. And spit-roasting entailed a universe of now defunct technologies like gravity jacks, which replaced child- or canine-powered turnspits. There was even a dog of that name with short legs and a long body, specially bred, as Wilson puts it, to "trundle around" in a large wheel connected to the spit with a pulley. Medieval Britons consumed the final product by clamping the meat between their incisors and tugging or cutting off the hunk that remained in their mouths with the sharp personal eating knife they carried at all times. By the 18th century, they had adopted the fork, and in changing their table manners also changed their physiognomy. Wilson cites the provocative theories of the aptly named anthropologist Charles Loring Brace to show that the overbite we consider a normal part of our anatomy is only about 200 to 250 years old. If we still used the inelegant technique Brace termed the "stuff-and-cut," we would have an "edge-to-edge" bite like that of chimpanzees. The fossil record shows that the Chinese, who have been cutting up their food very small for centuries, developed an overbite 800 to 1,000 years earlier than Europeans. And then there's the spork, a combination of spoon and fork in name as well as shape, which has developed a fond if tongue-in-cheek following in the past several decades. During his second year in office, Bill Clinton called it "the symbol of my presidency" during a humorous speech delivered at the Radio and Television Correspondents" Dinner in Washington. "No more false choice between the left utensil and the right utensil," he joked. That über-utensil, the food processor, has gone far beyond replacing the mortar and pestle to play a huge role in our diets, almost certainly contributing to the current obesity epidemic. Studies cited by Wilson show that by reducing the need to chew our food, processors eliminate some of the work it takes our body to digest it. Although the calories on paper may be identical, the body receives more energy (translating into pounds) from 100 calories of processed food than from 100 calories of whole food. Because many of us don't cook with any regularity, contemporary designers have chosen to organize the kitchen around the "hard, chilly lines" of the refrigerator rather than the warmth of the stove, traditional symbol of the hearth. "When we can't think what else to do, we open the fridge door and stare into it long and hard as if it will provide the answer to life's great questions," Wilson trenchantly observes. Samsung has even released a "smart fridge," but despite its Wi-Fi, weather reports and Twitter feeds, I prefer to get my intelligence from a much more congenial kitchen oracle, Bee Wilson. Dawn Drzal has written about food, travel and fiction for The Times, Food & Wine and other publications.