American
Paul Freedman is an American historian who teaches at Yale University, where he is the Chester D. Tripp Professor of History. He specializes in medieval Europe, especially Catalonia, and in the history of food. His books include The Diocese of Vic: Tradition and Regeneration in Medieval Catalonia, Images of the Medieval Peasant, and Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination, which traces how Europeans valued, bought and imagined spices. He also edited Food: The History of Taste, a survey of eating from prehistory to the present, and wrote Ten Restaurants That Changed America, a study of American dining. His work links the economic and social history of the Middle Ages with the study of cuisine and consumption, and it brought food history to both academic and general readers.