Do you love to cook? So does food legend Alice Waters, the subject of my piece on "60 Minutes" this Sunday. Alice Waters started and still promotes the idea of using fresh, unprocessed, locally grown food – and, we learned recently, Michelle Obama is promoting the idea, too.
At 64, Waters has done more to change how Americans eat, cook and think about food than Julia Child. She’s the mother of a movement, now called "Slow Food," which is a healthy alternative to fast food. Now she is working to influence another generation, and has created a course for schoolchildren in Berkeley. During this course, the children have planted a garden and are learning the how-tos and whys of this healthy way of growing, cooking and eating.
http://www.wowowow.com/entertainment/60-minutes-alice-waters-and-antidote-fast-food-video-236251(CBS) Sunday, March 15, 2009
THE CHAIRMAN - In a rare interview with a sitting Federal Reserve chairman - the first in 20 years - Ben Bernanke tells Scott Pelley what went wrong with America's financial system, how it caused the current economic crisis, what the Fed's doing to help fix it and when he expects the crippling recession to end. Henry Schuster and Rebecca Peterson are the producers. This is a double-length segment.
ALICE WATERS - She has been cooking and preaching the virtues of fresh food grown in an environmentally friendly way for decades. A world-class restaurant and eight cookbooks to her credit, she's become famous for her "slow food" approach - an antidote to fast food. Lesley Stahl reports. Ruth Streeter is the producer.
http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/60minutes/main3415.shtmlhttp://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4862576nhttp://www.slowfoodusa.org/index.php/events/detail/60_minutes_interview_with_alice_waters/http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?f=/c/a/2008/08/30/BACF12LHMU.DTL&o=2Alice Waters and Obama’s ‘Kitchen’ Cabinet
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/11/alice-waters-and-obamas-kitchen-cabinet/
The Edible Schoolyard: Alice Waters' Chez Panisse Foundation
http://justcauseit.com/articles/edible-schoolyard-alice-waters-chez-pannisse-foundationhttp://www.edibleschoolyard.org/by Ann Simms
In the summer of 1969, Alice Waters and a friend were traveling across the plains of central Anatolia in a tiny, beat-up Morris Minor. Waters had just completed her coursework at the Montessori Institute in London, where she was preparing to become a high school teacher. This trip to Turkey, along with the next year she would spend restaurant hopping in France, was to be her last hurrah before launching a lifelong career in education.
Things didn’t go exactly as planned. One evening, the traveling companions pitched their tent near a flock of goats. The next morning, Waters woke to find a small token of charity that changed her perspective forever.
“Somebody had put a bowl of fresh goat’s milk under the flap of our tent,” she recalls, sitting at a window table last month at her Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse. She remembers being deeply affected by this anonymous gift, as well as by the culinary savories she sampled in France. So she put her love of teaching on the back burner in favor of her passion for food and hospitality. She started in 1971 at a simmer, with $10,000 borrowed from her father (the Bank of America refused her application for a loan because she had no previous experience as a restaurant owner) and a plan to open a “simple, real food” restaurant for an intimate clientele of family and friends. It wasn’t long, however, before the simmer heated up to a rolling boil, with celebrity patrons from Bill Clinton to the Dalai Lama becoming regulars.
Chez Panisse, named after a character in a 1930s trilogy of movies by Marcel Pagnol, has become known for the quality of its ingredients, its dedication to paying farmers a living wage, and its celebration of seasonal fruits and vegetables. In addition to serving food with a distinctly French flair (for its 35th birthday on August 28 of this year, Waters served a classic Provençal fish and shellfish stew with saffron, wild fennel and rouille), the restaurant is also famous for its almost shocking simplicity. (Remarkably, dessert on the prix fixe menu was once a single peach.) The restaurant, now considered one of the nation’s finest, was recently rated by Michelin, the infamous French food rating system that has led at least one chef to commit suicide over rumors that he might be losing his ranking. Upon receiving only one out of a possible three stars, Waters said, “You know, I’ve always wanted a little one-star restaurant. When I was in France, they were the ones I loved the most.”
<snip>
Waters is part of the “slow food” movement, initiated by Carlo Petrini in 1986 when he championed an effort against the building of a McDonald’s near the Spanish Steps in Rome. “The protesters, whom Carlo armed with bowls of penne, defiantly and deliciously stated their case against the global standardization of the world’s food,” wrote Waters in the forward to Petrini’s collection of essays entitled Slow Food: The Case for Taste. Referred to by some as the “culinary wing” of the anti-globalization movement, Slow Food aims to combat the proliferation of fast food and preserve cultural cuisines as well as their associated food plants, domestic animals, and farming technologies.
These are the values that the Edible Schoolyard hopes to impress upon children. It won’t be easy. With the junk food industry pouring cash into advertising directed toward children, the Edible Schoolyard has its work cut out for it. But Waters is determined. “Once you realize that there’s no mushrooms in the schools, and no electricity to plug the refrigerator into, people will begin to wake up to the neglect and maybe we can make a change.”
A Delicious Revolution
by Alice Waters
http://www.ecoliteracy.org/publications/rsl/alice-waters.htmlLearning to make the right choices about food is the single most important key to environmental awareness — for ourselves, and especially for our children. Until we see how we feed ourselves as just as important as — and maybe more important than — all the other activities of mankind, there is going to be a huge hole in our consciousness. If we don't care about food, then the environment will always be something outside of ourselves. And yet the environment can be something that actually affects you in the most intimate — and literally visceral — way. It can be something that actually gets inside you and gets digested.
<snip>
What could be a more delicious revolution than to start committing our best resources to teaching this to children — by feeding them and giving them pleasure; by teaching them how to grow food responsibly; and by teaching them how to cook it and eat it, together, around the table? When you start to open up a child's senses — when you invite children to engage, physically, with gardening and food — there is a set of values that is instilled effortlessly, that just washes over them, as part of the process of offering good food to one another. Children become so rapt — so enraptured, even — by being engaged in learning in a sensual, kinesthetic way. And food seduces you by its very nature — the smell of baking, for example: It makes you hungry! Who could resist the aroma of fresh bread, or the smell of warm tortillas coming off the comal?
There is nothing else as universal. There is nothing else so powerful. When you understand where your food comes from, you look at the world in an entirely different way. I think that if you really start caring about the world in this way, you see opportunities everywhere. Wherever I am, I'm always looking to see what's edible in the landscape. Now I see Nature not just as a source of spiritual inspiration — beautiful sunsets and purple mountains majesties — but as the source of my physical nourishment. And I've come to realize that I'm totally dependent on it, in all its beauty and richness, and that my survival depends on it.
<snip>
What we're doing now is building models and demonstration projects, such as The Edible Schoolyard, to prove that this kind of experiential education is truly a viable initiative. In Berkeley we're about to transform the school lunch program of an entire school district, with over seventeen schools and over 10,000 students, in collaboration with the school board, Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute, the Center for Ecoliteracy, and the Chez Panisse Foundation. This is a revolutionary way of thinking about food in schools — it's what I call a Delicious Revolution.
Wendell Berry has written that eating is an agricultural act. I would also say that eating is a political act, but in the way the ancient Greeks used the word "political" — not just to mean having to do with voting in an election, but to mean "of, or pertaining to, all our interactions with other people" — from the family to the school, to the neighborhood, the nation, and the world. Every single choice we make about food matters, at every level. The right choice saves the world. Paul Cézanne said: "The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution." So let us all make our food decisions in that spirit: let us observe that carrot afresh, and make our choice.
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