Charles Perry, grandson of a silent film screenwriter and great-grandson of gold rush pioneers, is an internationally known food historian. He majored in Middle East studies at Princeton University, UC Berkeley, and the British Foreign Service’s Middle East Centre for Arab Studies in Lebanon. After a detour as a roommate of the future LSD millionaire, Owsley Stanley, and eight years as a staff writer at Rolling Stone Magazine, Charles became a food writer and assembled the world's largest collection of medieval Arab cookbooks. He worked at the Los Angeles Times Food section and has published widely on Middle Eastern food history. Also, as a result of that sixties detour, Charles has written The Haight-Ashbury: A History (1984) and I Want to Take You Higher (1997).