Paula Wolfert receives the 2018 JBF Lifetime Achievement Award

Yesterday the James Beard Foundation announced the recipient of its 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award. This year the honor goes to Paula Wolfert, who has won numerous awards including three  Julia Child Awards, five James Beard Cookbook Awards, The M.F.K. Fisher Award, and The Tastemaker Award. She’s also been a finalist for the British Andre Simon Award. 

Wolfert’s many bestselling cookbooks include The Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean, The Food of Morocco, and The Cooking of Southwest France. In 2008, the author was named to the James Beard Foundation’s Cookbook Hall of Fame. 

Most recently, Wolfert was the subject of an award-winning cookbook/biography, Unforgettable, by Emily Kaiser Thelin. The book tells the incredible story of Wolfert’s pioneering life and work. Wolfert was diagnosed with early-stage Alzheimer’s disease in 2013, and following her diagnosis, she decided to stop teaching and writing so she could to devote herself to Alzheimer’s activism. 

It’s difficult to imagine a more worthy recipient of this prestigious award, which is bestowed upon a person in the industry whose lifetime body of work has had a positive and long-lasting impact on the way we eat, cook, and think about food in America.