HTML Entities in Post Title

I’m inserting posts into wordpress using a script which is loaded through CRON. Before inserting each post I am checking whether the post with the same title exists or not. Below is the snippet I’m using:

if( is_null(get_page_by_title( $page_title, 'OBJECT', $post_type )) ) {
    // Create post object
    $my_post = array(
        'post_title' => "Food & Wine",  // this is example and it actually inserts $page_title.
        'post_content' => 'Dummy content',
        'post_status' => 'draft',
        'post_author' => 1,
        'post_type' => $post_type,
    );
    // Insert the post into the database
    wp_insert_post( $my_post );
} else {
    echo 'Post already exists.';
}

Now this insertion part works pretty well, but it stores ‘&’ as html entity (&) in the database. So in the database, the post title looks like “Food & Wine”. In the list of posts admin screen, the title looks fine with ‘&’ and once I go to the edit screen, it shows &.

This causes the first ‘if’ condition to return TRUE and it inserts a duplicate post. My database collation type is “utf8_general_ci”. Well this works on my local MAMP installation, but fails on my shared host.

I would like to know what is wrong in the code and how should this situation be handled. Also is it suggested to escape html entities for the ‘post_content’?

Thanks.