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Alice Waters | page 1, 2, 3

In one of several letters to President Clinton, Waters calls on him to publicly address the need to abolish the unhealthy way we grow our food and feed ourselves, to "invigorate public dialogue by turning our attention to how food must be at the center of our lives."

Why does she feel such a goal is so essential to our country's future? "Communities are brought together when people care about what they eat," says Waters. "I continue to believe that the very best way to bring people together is by changing the role food plays in our national life."

But what about those who can barely get by on food stamps? In response she writes, "Often somebody will complain that it is all very well for me -- the owner of an expensive restaurant with a sophisticated clientele located in a mild climate -- to prescribe this kind of eating, but for most Americans it is a luxury that is all but out of reach."

Not so, says Waters. "Fresh, nourishing food need never again be stigmatized as elitist. Wholesome, honest food must be the entitlement of all Americans, not just the rich." (One is tempted to pause and wonder how much the president, unrepentant Big Mac lover, took to heart Waters' notion that a reformed America is a junk-food-free America.)

However noble and well-intentioned, Waters' dream will be a difficult one to realize. She may have changed the way the Brahmins eat, but how do you introduce such rarefied fare to a populace that can buy a Whopper at Burger King for a fraction of the price of a Chez Panisse appetizer? It's expensive to produce and buy organic, seasonal, farm-fresh food. Which explains why even today Chez Panisse reportedly earns little profit. The ingredients -- whenever possible, organic produce and free-range and chemical-free meats -- are costly, and the preparation she demands is time-consuming. She lives her own life with as little pretension and as much simplicity as she demands of her food. She doesn't live grandly. With her daughter, Fanny, and husband, Stephen Singer, a wine and olive oil merchant and painter, Waters lives in an unassuming, slightly ramshackle Berkeley house close to the restaurant. This is in keeping with her broader effort to reach a social utopia. Live, work and eat locally. Stay committed to your community; nourish it and in return it will nourish you.

And if you don't have what you need in your own community, create it. When Waters opened Chez Panisse, she couldn't find the kind of food that was so readily available during her idyllic days strolling through the French farmers' markets. So she established relationships with local farmers and ranchers, encouraging them to grow healthy foods. Where most high-end restaurants have purchasing agents, Waters hired a full-time "forager" to find suppliers who produce quality, ideally organic, ingredients. "Unfortunately," Waters said in an interview with Online Chef, "it took a long time to develop a local farming system to produce and support fresh, local ingredients."

But what revolution happens overnight? It takes years for awareness to grow, but eventually that awareness spirals outward. Through the basic principle of supply and demand, everything from pesticide-free corn and berries to steroid-free chicken and beef have become more readily available. Waters' relentless demand for local ingredients and her allegiance to healthy, organic food has nourished a national trend that encourages community-supported, sustainable agriculture. In the end, Waters has proven herself correct. "The act of eating is very political," she says. "You buy from the right people, you support the right network of farmers and suppliers who care about the land and what they put in the food. If we don't preserve the natural resources, you aren't going to have a sustainable society."

At least in Berkeley and on the farms and ranches of the surrounding San Francisco Bay Area, Waters has helped create the sustainable society she envisioned. She buys from 75 different vendors. This tight society of food growers and merchants know one another and depend on one another to live. To drive home her commitment to the local farmers, in 1996 -- to commemorate Chez Panisse's 25th anniversary -- Waters started the Chez Panisse Foundation. To date, the organization has donated a quarter of a million dollars to nonprofit organizations that promote sustainable agriculture.

In 1990, Waters learned of the Garden Project at the San Francisco County Jail. The program, spearheaded by Catherine Sneed, served as job-training outreach, giving inmates an education in organic gardening and providing them with a place to work when they're released. After seeing how dramatically the inmates changed their way of thinking after they got involved, Waters joined the project's board and participates in its planning and development. For almost a decade, Chez Panisse has been one of the Garden Project's most committed customers.

The county jail's Garden Project inspired Waters' own project: the Edible Schoolyard at Berkeley's Martin Luther King Middle School. The cafeteria at the local middle school had long been shut down, only to be replaced by a "snack shack" that served packaged hamburgers, burritos and pizza. Waters proposed a curriculum to the school's staff that allowed the students to plant and harvest their own food, then cook, serve and eat it for lunch. At the beginning, the notion seemed too idealistic, a far-fetched plan that would never be realized. Would junior high students who didn't know from an heirloom tomato scoff at the notion of eating a lunch made from food they raised in their own organic garden? Today the half acre, formerly buried in weeds and cracked asphalt, is a flourishing vegetable and fruit garden.

This is only the beginning of Waters' dream. She's hoping that the Martin Luther King Middle School will inspire other schools nationwide. In Waters' utopia, all children will be reaping the seeds they sow. We will all sit down and break the bread we've made together -- stopping long enough to realize what we have before us, and what we've been missing.
salon.com | Nov. 16, 1999

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