Before a crowd of slow-food evangelists from Orange County, the legendary Alice Waters is introduced as the Berkeley activist who founded the farm-to-fork movement at Chez Panisse 45 years ago.
Small in stature, but larger than life as she speaks, the 72-year-old Waters – one of the most honored chefs in America – graciously modifies the moniker often bestowed upon her.
Serving market-fresh ingredients is not a food revolution she created. The Chez Panisse ethos is only a reminder of how enriching, joyful and simple eating is meant to be, she told a spellbound crowd Saturday at The Ecology Center in San Juan Capistrano.
“These are ideas that have been around since the beginning of civilization,” she said. “Growing your own food. Celebrating the harvest. Thinking of food as precious.”
The Green Feast benefit dinner was Waters’ first appearance in the county. She came to support her latest passion project: reforming school lunch programs.
“We want kids to take the time to discover cuisines from all around the world. Wouldn’t it be great if the food (they ate) were local? It could change farming overnight,” she said.
The Green Feast supports the center’s effort to bring edible gardens to south Orange County schools. It is modeled after Waters’ The Edible Schoolyard project, launched in Berkeley in 1996. Waters agreed to host the dinner after learning about the center’s work at more than two dozen local schools.
After touring the grounds, situated next to a 28-acre organic farm, she delighted in the rural scenery of native plants, herbs and fruit trees. “This is an oasis.”
The admitted Francophile said empowering children to think differently about food is critical. “I’m convinced that the only way to really make significant change is in the public school system – it’s the place you can reach every child.”
She envisions an American cafeteria much like those in France, where children are served coursed meals in a family-style environment. She describes a scene from Michael Moore’s latest documentary, “Where to Invade Next.”
The Academy Award-winning filmmaker is gleaning social and economic ideas for America. At a French public school, he shows students dining on scallops, beets and cheese. They are sharing, socializing and drinking water. When Moore attempts to sway the children to drink from a can of Coke, they balk at the unappealing and unhealthy contraband.
“I loved it,” Waters told the rapt audience.
In a one-on-one interview with the Register, Waters talked about other critical food issues facing our society, her food awakening in Paris, her belief in the Montessori way of learning and her thoughts on social media.
On her life-altering time in France as a UC Berkeley student in the mid-1960s: “I went to Paris when I was 19. It really was a revelation, an awakening for me. I felt like I had never really eaten food before. I was there when it was a slow-food culture. People went to the markets to buy good food in their neighborhood and to the bakery to buy bread. We’d go a second time in the afternoon to get food. Kids came home for lunch to eat for two hours. Students got free tickets to the opera and to the museums. I had never had a baguette. I had never had apricot jam like that. It was the taste that woke me up, but it was the beauty of it too. I came back home, and I wanted to live like the French.”
On her initial desire for Chez Panisse: “I wasn’t trying to build a movement. I never imagined it would be nothing but a neighborhood restaurant. I think the restaurant was born out of that (French experience) composite – the idea of simplicity. The idea of the salad after the main dish to cleanse the plate. And, not too much on the plate. Those ideas were fixed on my mind. When a season was over, it’s over. That’s really how it began.”
On today’s slow-food movement: “I think there’s a counterculture in this country, if you will. Like the one that powered me in the 1970s. There was a group of people who wanted to do things differently. They wanted things that were alive.”
On the phrase “farm to table” – is it overused? “It is only sad when it is used by the fast-food culture to tell a story about something that isn’t true.”
On acceptance of Chez Panisse when it opened: “I never worried about whether people would come. I felt if it were really good, they would come, and they have come.”
On the Edible Schoolyard project – how do you get every kid in public school a farm-fresh lunch? “I think we need a very sizable soda tax that can pay for a free school lunch for every child in this country. When I say a real school lunch, I mean a lunch that supports the farmers who are taking care of our land (and) supports the local community.”
On the most important food issue we face today: “The myth that food can be cheap. It can be affordable, but it can never be cheap. Maybe you have your own garden and you don’t count your labor. People think it should be fast, cheap and easy. Even the presidents of universities say they would like to buy organic food, but it’s always a question of money. They’ve been indoctrinated. To change that, we really have to educate people about the work of the farm and really understand what it is to waste food.”
On food waste – is it worse now compared with 40 years ago? “I think there’s a greater awareness about it, but there’s still not an understanding of what to do. It’s like I go to N.Y. and on the streets, the garbage is piled up 10 feet high. I think we’re in a culture that wants us to waste, and buy a new one. To get out of it, we have to be self-reliant.”
On The Ecology Center, and the Green Feast event: “I love what they are doing here. They have set this beautiful table. It’s gorgeous. It represents, for me, the pleasure of work, which has been lost. Work is something we don’t want to do, and fun is over there. But, I always think they need to go together. Work can be fun. Sometimes it’s harder than other times, but it’s never without meaning. And, we have given people meaningless work. And it’s what depresses an enormous sector of this population – being asked to do meaningless work.”
On using Montessori training to educate children about the food cycle: “It’s an education of the senses. You’re touching things. You’re learning by doing. We’ve forgotten about how important that is. We are getting more and more estranged, with our cellphones and our computers. We aren’t smelling the world, using our hands. We’re not playing as children in the woods and it’s doing a lot of damage to the development of our brain.”
On social media: “I do like using my Instagram. I actually take the pictures and put them in myself. I don’t do much of it. I’m not a Facebook person. I’m into hand-writing letters.”
Contact the writer: nluna@ocregister.com
