She was formerly a research fellow in the history of ideas at St John's College Cambridge, working on the history of political thought. Her PhD (from Trinity College, Cambridge) was on early French utopian socialism. She also attended the University of Pennsylvania on a Thouron Award fellowship.

For five years from 1998 she was the food critic of the New Statesman magazine, where she wrote about such subjects as Adolf Hitler's diet, melons, the history of soup and school meals. Since 2003, she has written a weekly food column ('The Kitchen Thinker') in Stella magazine (The Sunday Telegraph) for which she has three times been named the Guild of Food Writers food journalist of the year, in 2004, 2008 and 2009.

Wilson is a regular book reviewer for The Sunday Times and The Times Literary Supplement, for whom she has written articles on the history of bread, and coffee In 2008, she wrote a critic at large article for The New Yorker on the 'end of food'. Wilson has also contributed articles to the London Review of Books, especially on film

She is the author of two books, The Hive: The Story of the Honeybee and Us (2004) and Swindled: From Poison Sweets to Counterfeit Coffee, the Dark History of the Food Cheats (2008), a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week.