Open your kitchen drawers and cupboards and the chances are that you will see there are a spectacular array of implements. Slicers, mashers, peelers, crushers and parers are only the start of it: there are also those cumbersome white elephants that once promised a healthy, more authentic culinary experience, such as the breadmaker, the juicer and the pasta maker.

In her wonderful new book, food writer Bee Wilson unpacks the paraphernalia of the average kitchen and shows that at the heart of the batterie de cuisine there are few basic requirements. Fire, a pot and a knife are all that's needed to create food  a spoon will help with eating it.

Divided into sections, the book examines these basic elements and others  among them "measurement", "ice" and "grind". Attached to each one is a short reflection on a single piece of cooking apparatus. But like all the best books on apparently simple everyday commodities, this is of course really a gripping story of millennia of human ingenuity. Over the centuries the need to eat has led us to develop an astonishing plethora of niche skills and equipment, has made of eating itself a highly sophisticated act of pleasure as well as survival.

Each era brings its own fashion for now forgotten delicacies and the means to prepare and enjoy them. Current fads include freeze-drying and canisters of liquid nitrogen, but who now uses the marrow spoons and celery goblets of the fashionable Edwardian chef?

Wilson shoots off down alleyways and unexpected tangents. She gives us disquisitions on the evolution of human teeth  how archaeological remains can tell us of the necessity of chewing for survival. The Chinese, we learn, chopped their food (having developed superior knife-making skills) well before humans in the west and consequently their jaws evolved the overbite so crucial to the intake of soft food nearly 1,000 years earlier.

I had no idea it was as late as the Renaissance that eggs were discovered to be a raising agent. She examines the extraordinary transformations that raw ingredients make when they are combined with others, the effects of heat and cold, of beating, whisking and boiling. She looks at the thousands of years of pot development that has taken us from the crudest (but effective) clay to Teflon (easy to clean but not always so effective to cook in). The Icelandic tradition was to dangle ingredients in hot geysers; in Ireland and Polynesia they filled a hole in the ground with water and filled it with raw food and stones heated on a fire. The earliest recipes on record simply advised: "Assemble all the ingredients in the pot".

Heat is the single vital component that transforms things you can eat into cooked food. Wilson takes us from the open fire, through the spit, the hearth, the clay oven and the range, to the modern stove. But she is right to point out that although an electric oven does the job well enough, a hob really should be gas fired  the ring of blue flame under a pan a reminder of the primal pleasures of cooking.

Wilson writes: "Our kitchens are filled with ghosts. You may not see them but you could not cook as you do without their ingenuity: those potters who first enabled us to boil and stew; the pioneers of gas and electric ovens; the scale-makers; the inventors of egg-beaters and peelers." The introduction of the fork, made for genteel spearing and nibbling, made the simple, unpretentious spoon look uncouth and sloppy. Clarence Birdseye, who commercialised the frozen meal, was inspired by what he observed of food preservation during his long winters in northern Canada working as a fur-trapper, to "reproduce the Laborador winter in New England". A section on grinding resistant ingredients to a palatable consistency, includes not only the pestle and mortar but the wonders of the food processor.

Witty, scholarly, utterly absorbing and fired by infectious curiosity, Consider the Fork wears its impressive research lightly; Wilson has given us a long view on everyday life  the early experiments of our primitive ancestors cast a long and complex shadow over the meals we eat. As we kit out our kitchens with every conceivable culinary device, it's salutary to be reminded that behind the shining chrome and plastic, the elemental components of human eating are still a pot, a fire and a knife.

What new intellectual vistas remain to be conquered by the food obsessive? Now that "consumer ethics", philosophy, spiritualism and history may be studied exclusively through the steamed-up spectacles of the orally fixated, and there are studies of individual foodstuffs as well as monographs on historic-moments-in-food (what Churchill gobbled at state dinners; what you could have scarfed on the Titanic before drowning), where else can swollen-stomached literary foodism waddle off to? The erudite and witty food writer Bee Wilson has spotted a gap in the market. "There have been books on potatoes, cod and chocolate and histories of cookbooks, restaurants and cooks," she reminds us, but not yet a general history of food technology. So her survey takes in everything from the long-ago invention of pots and pans, through changing habits of cutlery use and different ways to harness combustion, right up to the absurdist laboratory furniture of today's kitchen "modernists" such as Heston Blumenthal.

Apparently the reader must first be persuaded that food is a respectable topic, as though our age weren't already thoroughly basted in the greasy ideology that preparing food, eating food, thinking about food, and talking to a TV camera about food are the noblest pursuits of man or woman. "Food is the great human universal," Wilson alleges. "Nothing is certain in this world except death and taxes, the saying goes. It should really be death and food."

Once the special pleading is out of the way, the argument is clear and persuasive. Changes in food technology change what can be prepared as a meal, thus changing what is habitually eaten, and often spurring wider social changes. The first clay cooking pots, Wilson says, allowed the invention of soups, which meant that more humans could survive into adulthood even if they had lost all their teeth. Other developments analysed here, with a consistent scholarly grace, include the blunt table knife, the gas hob, and the refrigerator. Had the fridge been invented sooner, Wilson points out alarmingly, we might never have had bacon or smoked salmon; once it had, people in the west suddenly began to gulp down yoghurt like there was no tomorrow.

The 20th century was the age of the electric kitchen gizmo, sometimes welcomed by professionalised gluttons with the hilarious lack of perspective characteristic of their breed: Wilson cites a 1970s New York Times foodie comparing the invention of the Cuisinart with that of the printing press. Such gadgets were called "labour-saving", yet, Wilson objects, once you've acquired an electric cake mixer, "you feel that you ought to make cakes". Countless 72-hour baking marathons later, it seems that "the mixer has cost you time, rather than saving it". Still, one might gently object, you do also now have a lot of cakes.

Inevitably, there is occasionally something of the Private Eye column "Me and My Spoon" about all this, not least when the author is actually talking about spoons. (Describing differences between Puritan and Restoration spoon-handles, she writes: "Spoons hold up a mirror to the surrounding culture precisely because they are so universal." Wilson also confides that "My pestle and mortar comes from Thailand and is fashioned from craggy black granite," that her pots have "foibles" and "moods", and that her family has enjoyed "stalwart service from a medium-sized lidded pan with two small looped handles". But then one often develops an affection for well-used tools. (I adore no pot, but have an unreasonable affection for certain scuffed mechanical pencils and blunt guitar picks.)

I was less convinced by Wilson's extended paean to the fat-handled OXO vegetable peeler, allegedly "a game-changer", but perhaps making a game out of peeling potatoes would help pass the time. In general, Wilson is robustly sceptical of the modern foodie's condescending veneration of manual labour: Italian families who make their own pasta, she points out, still don't grind their own flour, and mayonnaise from a blender is no worse than that fatiguingly worked by wrist. Still, there is a strain of nostalgia throughout her book for old skills that were rendered unnecessary by new technology, and so lost. Managing a roaring open fire, for example, used to be an essential part of roasting  as well as handling the geese or dogs that, pitiably, would often work the treadmill for the spit.

At one point, Wilson mentions a Nazi policy encouraging citizens to cook an old-fashioned "one-pot meal", and writes: "Like many other fascist symbols, it harks back to the archaic." The same is true of many haute-foodist symbols, not excluding Wilson's own exotically craggy mortar and pestle. Yet, as her own research amply and elegantly demonstrates, the modern gastromaniac who idealises a more "authentic" kind of kitchen labour from the past is not making a humane stand against technology but simply expressing a more-or-less arbitrary preference for one (older) technology over another. As long as you're not willing to bite chunks directly out of a raw animal, it's technology all the way down.

Signing off with a tantalisingly brief chapterette on coffee, Wilson notes that the fashion for expensive home espresso machines has of late given way, among serious adepts of that remarkable bean, to a rediscovery of the joys of the cafetière and filter machine. Perhaps, she suggests playfully, the next new thing will turn out to the even cruder combination of "jug and spoon". Maybe; or maybe you can go too far with the neat reversal. In any case, they can pry my burr grinder and Aeropress out of my cold, dead hands.

 Steven Poole's You Aren't What You Eat: Fed Up With Gastroculture is published by Union Books.