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If Chez Panisse started a delicious revolution, Alice Waters has been its caterer.
Photo by David Wasserman

by Tom Valtin
Alice Waters, Master Speaker

Alice Waters didn't know she was starting a movement when she opened Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, California, 25 years ago. A former Montessori school teacher, Waters knew that she wanted to feature locally and organically grown foods, seasonally harvested, on her menu. She could hardly have known that Chez Panisse would serve as the mother church for a fundamental shift in Americans' perceptions about food. It has been said that if Chez Panisse started a delicious revolution, Waters has been its caterer.

"The way Americans relate to food is central to the way we relate to the environment," she asserts. "Our environmental crisis is largely the result of bad food and poor food choices. Food education is really environmental education, and making the right choices about food is the key to environmental awareness."

Waters credits author and agrarian Wendell Berry with being the first American to spread the word about how food choices affect the environment—the notion that "eating is an agricultural act." But it was Waters who picked up the torch, pioneering the idea that knowledge about food and where it comes from — "eco-literacy," she calls it — should be part of every public school curriculum.

To that end, ten years ago Waters started the Edible Schoolyard at Martin Luther King Middle School in Berkeley — a quarter-acre garden in which students are the gardeners. "The garden is woven into the curriculum of the school," she explains, "helping teach children what it means to be civilized and connected with the earth. When you understand where your food comes from, you see the world in a different way. We should teach our kids that learning to take care of the land is just as important as reading, writing, and arithmetic."

Waters says three-quarters of American children no longer sit down with their parents to eat dinner, and that meals are now taken in haste—and alone. "Fast food comes with an indoctrination that it's OK to waste, that food is cheap, and that standardization is more important than quality," she says. "We need to bring our children into a new relationship with food, and schools are the only way to reach all children in society."

Waters recalls meeting former Sierra Club director and fellow Berkeley resident David Brower when he came to eat at Chez Panisse on the occasion of his 80th birthday. "Before he made the food-environment connection, he used to take his family to Denny's," she jokes. "But once he learned about what we were doing, he started using the restaurant as his own canteen."

"Food is where human rights and the environment intersect.

-- 09/09/2005 Fri
5pm