He also authored or co-authored books about San Francisco in the 1960s, and was a prolific journalist for Rolling Stone, the Los Angeles Times and other publications.
In 1961, he transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, and in 1962 he spent a year at the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies in Shemlan, Lebanon, where he earned the British Foreign Office’s higher standard interpretership certificate.
In his senior year, one of his roommates was the future “LSD millionaire” Owsley Stanley; as a result of their friendship, Perry was present for most of the great events of the San Francisco psychedelic scene of the mid-1960s.
[3] In 1980, he spent two months in Egypt, Syria and England collecting medieval Arabic cookery manuscripts and subsequently added more from Turkey and elsewhere.
He lives in the Los Angeles area and continues to contribute scholarly and popular articles about food to such publications as Saudi Aramco World and the Istanbul-based Cornucopia.