Paul Freedman – författare

From Delmonico’s to Sylvia’s to Chez Panisse, a daring and original history of dining out in America as told through ten legendary restaurants

Combining a historian’s rigor with a foodie’s palate, Ten Restaurants That Changed America reveals how the history of our restaurants reflects nothing less than the history of America itself.

Whether charting the rise of our love affair with Chinese food through San Francisco’s fabled the Mandarin, evoking the richness of Italian food through Mamma Leone’s, or chronicling the rise and fall of French haute cuisine through Henri Soulé’s Le Pavillon, food historian Paul Freedman uses each restaurant to tell a wider story of race and class, immigration and assimilation. Freedman also treats us to a scintillating history of the then-revolutionary Schrafft’s, a chain of convivial lunch spots that catered to women, and that bygone favorite, Howard Johnson’s, which pioneered on-the-road dining, only to be swept aside by McDonald’s.

Ten Restaurants That Changed America is a significant and highly entertaining social history.

An award-winning historian makes the case for food’s cultural importance, stressing its crucial role throughout human historyWhy does food matter? Historically, food has not always been considered a serious subject on par with, for instance, a performance art like opera or a humanities discipline like philosophy. Necessity, ubiquity, and repetition contribute to the apparent banality of food, but these attributes don’t capture food’s emotional and cultural range, from the quotidian to the exquisite. In this short, passionate audiobook, Paul Freedman makes the case for food’s vital importance, stressing its crucial role in the evolution of human identity and human civilizations. Freedman presents a highly readable and illuminating account of food’s unique role in our lives, a way of expressing community and celebration, but also divisive with regard to race, cultural difference, gender, and geography. This wide-ranging book will be a must-read for food lovers and all those interested in how cultures and identities are formed and maintained.

Kinship Worldview: Indigenous Authors Going Deeper with Holistic Education is a collection of essays and poems offering testimony to the holism of original traditional Indigenous ways of knowing, teaching and learning. Each chapter describes an Indigenous orientation to holistic education that explores deeply into the sacred interconnectedness of all life on Mother Earth. This collection from internationally recognized Indigenous scholars and leaders reflects a “coherent worldview encompassing the processes of the world and how we humans find meaning in those processes” (Wildcat 2001, 7 – From Power and Place: Indian Education in America. Fulcrum Publishing).

Indigenous worldview is the ultimate foundation for holistic education. Unfortunately, holistic education has been held back by post-colonial worlding, defined as the result of colonizing hegemony being intrinsic to most educational systems in dominant cultural schooling. As a result, implementation of this holistic ideal has fallen short of what we need to achieve in education. Here is a collection that returns to the roots of holism.