Craig Claiborne (September 4, 1920 January 22, 2000) was an American restaurant critic, food journalist and book author. A long-time food editor and restaurant critic for The New York Times, he was also the author of numerous cookbooks and an autobiography. Over the course of his career, he made many contributions to gastronomy and food writing in the United States. Early life Born in Sunflower, Mississippi, Claiborne was raised on the region's distinctive cuisine in the kitchen of his mother's boarding house in Indianola, Mississippi. He essayed in premedical studies at the Mississippi State College from 1937 to 1939. Finding it to be unsuitable, he then transferred to the University of Missouri, where he majored in journalism and got his B.A. degree. Claiborne served in the U.S. Navy during World War II and the Korean War. After deciding that his true passion lay in cooking, he used his G.I. Bill benefits to attend the École hôtelière de Lausanne (Lausanne Hotel School), located in Lausanne, Switzerland. Career Returning to the U.S. from Europe, he worked his way up in the food-publishing business in New York City, New York, as a contributor to Gourmet magazine and a food-product publicist, finally becoming the food editor of The New York Times in 1957. Claiborne was the first man to supervise the food page at a major American newspaper and is credited with broadening The New York Times'''s coverage of new restaurants and innovative chefs. A typical food section of a newspaper in the 1950s was largely targeted to a female readership and limited to columns on entertaining and cooking for the upscale homemaker. Claiborne brought his knowledge of cuisine and own passion for food to the pages, transforming it into an important cultural and social bellwether for New York City and the nation at large. Claiborne's columns, reviews and cookbooks introduced a generation of Americans to a variety of ethnic cuisines particularly Asian and Mexican cuisines at a time when average Americans had conservative tastes in food, and what little gourmet cooking was available in cities like New York was exclusively French (and, Claiborne observed, not terribly high quality). Looking to hold restaurants accountable for what they served and help the public make informed choices about where to spend their dining dollars, he created the four-star system of rating restaurants still used by The New York Times and which has been widely imitated. Claiborne's