She writes the "Table Talk" column for The Wall Street Journal, and is also a campaigner for food education through the charity TastEd.

[1] 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.

[citation needed] She earned her doctorate from Cambridge University for a dissertation on early French utopian socialism in 2002.

[citation needed] Wilson's next book, in 2008, was Swindled: From Poison Sweets to Counterfeit Coffee – The Dark History of the Food Cheats.

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.

[16] After that, Wilson wrote the "Kitchen Thinker" column in The Sunday Telegraph's "Stella" magazine for twelve years.

[23] She has written a series of "Long Reads" for The Guardian on subjects ranging from clean eating to ultra-processed food to the history of the British curryhouse.

[27][28] In 2019, Wilson co-founded a UK food education charity, TastEd, which describes itself as working "to give every child the opportunity to experience the joy of fresh vegetables and fruits".

[32] Wilson married the Cambridge political scientist David Runciman,[1] but he left the marriage of 23 years in June 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

[36] In The Observer, Rachel Cooke wrote that "Wilson is a brilliant researcher" and "has unearthed science that makes sense of our most intimate and tender worlds.

"[38] Writing in The Financial Times, Wendell Steavenson described Wilson's 2019 book The Way We Eat Now as "clear and vital reading...an authoritative and brilliantly compelling description of the economic, political and emotional issues around our food.