The Oxford Literary Festival, which this year takes place from March 16-24, will include several fascinating talks about food along with a presentation dinner at Gee’s Restaurant which will celebrate the winner of the £7,500 Jeremy Mogford Food and Drink Literary prize. Talks with food-related subjects include a slightly quirky talk by the award-winning historian and food writer Bee Wilson, who aims to open our eyes to the incredible creations and kitchen tools that have shaped how and what we cook.

Bee, who spent her childhood in Oxford, now writes a weekly food column, The Kitchen Thinker, in the Sunday Telegraph, for which she has been named the Guild of Food Writers’ Food Journalist of the Year. Her previous books include The Story of the Honey Bee and Us (John Murray £14.99), which recounts the astonishing tale of all the weird and wonderful things that humans believe about bees, exploring the bee’s impact on food and human ritual.

At the literary festival, Bee will be discussing her latest book Consider the Fork, which gives us a history of invention in the kitchen. She says it was the Ashmolean that stirred her interest in history. As a child she would frequently walk from her home in Jericho and visit the museum where she became fascinated by the Egyptian exhibits which included tools to cook with. She is aware that it took countless inventions to get from those early days to the well-equipped kitchens we have today, where items such as the low-tech wooden spoon joins forces with the mixers, freezers and microwaves. Bee sees the wooden spoon as the most trusty and loveable of kitchen implements. She says: “Look closely at your wooden spoon, is it oval or round, cupped or flat? Does it have an extra-long handle to give your hand a place of greater safety from the pot of bubbling liquid, or has it a pointy bit at one side to scrape up the lumpy bits in the corner of the pan? Whatever we are using it for, nothing does the job of a wooden spoon like a wooden spoon.”

Bee sees the wooden spoon as the most trusty and loveable of all kitchen implements, even though it does not switch on or off, or make funny noises. The wooden spoon does not look particularly sophisticated, yet think of the hundreds of meals it has helped prepare, the eggs it has scrambled, the chocolate it has helped to melt and the onions it has saved from catching, because it is non-abrasive and, therefore, gentle on the pan. Bee accepts wooden spoons suffer slightly if placed in the dishwasher too frequently — too much exposure to hot water tends to soften them in time, but this doesn’t seem to have stopped us collecting them over the years.

In a brief chapter on coffee, she writes of the espresso addicts who have started to notice you can spend a fortune on a glossy coffee machine with all the gadgets and do everything right when you process your coffee and still end up with a mediocre drink as there are too many variables.

The real action in coffee is now low tech, and we’ve actually come full circle. The most avant-garde coffee experts now favour French press and filter over pricy espresso machines. Bee concludes by saying it is only a matter of time before someone announces the next big thing — the jug and spoon!

Bee is amused by the kitchen gadgets people find most useful. For some people, the quirky objects they have used for years might look scruffy and worn, but to the owner they are a magical tool, without which they just couldn’t manage. I am inclined to agree — my puppy chewed up my beloved pastry brush last week and although I’ve bought a new one it’s just not the same.