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"Take, for instance, tomatoes," I say to Alice Waters '67, challenging the culinary legend with my tomato dilemma. "I love tomatoes, straight from the garden, and if I had a choice, and they were affordable, then of course I would buy them. But every time I go to the store, they don't have garden-fresh tomatoes, they have hothouse tomatoes." "No," Alice responds. "No tasteless, mealy, hothouse tomatoes. You buy fresh organic tomatoes that are delicious and ripe." "But the organic tomatoes are so expensive." "No, not if they're in season. You can get lots of wonderful local tomatoes at the farmer's market, very inexpensively." "But what if I can't get to the farmer's market, and all I can do is go to the store on the way home from work, and..." "Well, then you just don't have tomatoes." "Well, but what if I want tomatoes, and the--" "No, no, no. Then you just don't have them. Then you have squash or beans or artichokes or something else wonderful that is grown locally and is abundant and ripe and in season." Waters is smiling serenely, her soft fluttering voice answering the answers gently, but firmly, in the same "If all your friends were going to jump off a bridge, would you do it too?" tone that mothers use with stubborn children. I try again. "But, well, then with shopping, I mean, if you buy everything ripe, you have to go to the store every day, and I can't--" "No, you don't have to go to the store every day. I go twice a week. I go on Saturday and I go on Tuesday, and I look around and think: Right now these tomatoes are very ripe, so we'll eat them right away; and I'm going to buy a melon that's not quite ready, but in a few days it'll be perfect. I think that way all the time." "But I, I can't--" "Yes. Yes, you can. It takes some planning and attention, but it's better for your health, it's better for the environment, and it is well worth the small investment that you make. It takes a lot less time to cook when you have things that taste good because they are ripe and fresh." Somehow, I have unwittingly been led down a cobbled, organic garden path of principles, through a briar of sweet wild ideals, landing smack-dab in this fanciful world where everyone grows good food the right way, prepares it with love, and eats it together with joy and vitality. Welcome to Alice's Wonderland. Alice Waters's rise from Chatham, New Jersey girl to grande dame of California cuisine is as quaint as the 1930s Marcel Pagnol movies whose main characters inspired both the name of her restaurant, Chez Panisse, and her 16-year-old daughter, Fanny. Indeed, Waters retains a wondrous, gee-whiz attitude, talking about her success as if she can't believe it herself. "I didn't think about it," she says with a shrug. "I didn't imagine it would be anything like this. I just felt like I had to do it, and that's all I knew." In fact, Waters says, her culinary roots are hardly haute. "My mother really wasn't a very good cook," she says with a grin. "We never had anything especially fancy; and dinner, well, it wasn't very good...but"--Waters pauses, putting her finger in the air significantly--"we always had dinner together, at the table, at the same time, and we always had to sit there and do that every night." And that, for Waters, is perhaps the most important developmental structure one can give a child. "It shows kids that parents care," she says. "It gives them the punctuation, the rhythm of the day. And they know it's something that's consistent and about family time and communication." Beyond the family dinners, Waters looks back upon her college days at Cal as some of her most influential. "Oh, yes," she says. "It was the greatest time of my life, and that's why I came back here. I always knew I wanted to be in Berkeley. It was where everything was happening. I never knew him, but I think I have a lot in common with Mario Savio." Waters speaks with special reverence of the summer after her junior year when, at age 20 and armed with a few years of hippie culture and sensibilities, she went to Europe, where a passion for food was awakened in her. "I almost stayed in Greece," Waters remembers. "I had the most idyllic situation there. I had a place for only $17 a month, and the whole area was just filled with these wonderful aromas, and feta cheese and olives...." But she returned. "Well, I had to go back to school, had to finish, ...but I wonder what would have happened...well, this would never have happened, and so....So." What happened is a fairy tale of how, after going back to France following graduation, Waters taught herself how to cook; after a few years teaching Montessori school, she and a few friends scraped together some money and opened a little restaurant on Shattuck Avenue in north Berkeley. The idea was that it would be just like having dinner at a friend's house: one fixed meal for everyone, made from the freshest seasonal ingredients. Twenty-eight years later, the list of Waters's dinner party "friends" reads like a Who's Who of Hollywood and Washington combined, and has become a destination itself--provided, of course, that the tourist has made a reservation several months in advance. Chez Panisse has garnered worldwide acclaim, as has its proprietor and her legendary alchemy in the kitchen and her fanatical adherence to only the freshest, most perfect local ingredients for her meals. Today, Alice Waters is credited with single-handedly changing the way America eats. Not content to simply enjoy her cult status, Waters has taken on the agriculture industry, the American school system, and modern culture itself as the leader of what she refers to as the Slow Food Movement. In 1996 she founded the Chez Panisse Foundation to "support educational and cultural programs that promote sustainable agriculture." Everywhere Waters goes, she seems to leave an organic garden, whether at the Martin Luther King Jr. Middle school in Berkeley, or at a prison in Fremont. Her crusade drew both supportive cheers and snide jeers when she sent a letter to the notorious Big Mac addict himself, President Clinton, exhorting him to set a better dietary example, and urging him to plant organic gardens on the White House grounds, and hire an American, rather than a French, White House chef. Waters has reached out to the elementary school cafeterias, airline menus, and even the Louvre Museum in Paris, preaching culinary redemption. Each menu she takes on seems more and more impossible (fresh, organic airplane food?). But Waters unflappably stays the course. She has dispensed her methodology of meals in seven books, including the Chez Panisse Cafe Cookbook, which came out in September and sent Waters on a whirlwind nationwide book tour for most of the end of the year. Anyone who has been to a local farmer's market, bought organic produce, or eaten a cafe-baked pizzetta has been touched by Waters' gentle, discriminating hand. Practically inventing the phenomenon of the celebrity chef, Waters's kitchen has spawned such superstars as Jeremiah Tower, Wolfgang Puck, Paul Bertolli, and Joyce Goldstein. And yet, when Waters floats into the room, harried and a little bit breathless, running a hand through her cropped, red hair, one has to wonder how this papillionesque gentlewoman, who graciously introduces herself with sincere apologies for being on the phone so long, has taken on the prepackaged, processed planet. Her battle strategy, it seems, is to transform our eating habits by staying firmly rooted in her own. She unabashedly speaks the dialect of the unjaded '60s hippie, waxing passionate about fresh, organic food that is shared at the table in a big family community as nurturing to the soul and filling that spiritual abyss which modern bigger-faster-better-more society has dug in each of us. "Eating is a very political act," Waters counsels again and again. "Good healthy eating is simply not compatible with processed food. When you eat together, and eat a meal you cook yourselves, such meals honor the materials from which they are made; they honor the art by which they are done; they honor the people who make them, and those who share them. I believe food is a medium for us all to do more meaningful work in our own lives. And, more than that, I believe we have an ethical obligation to do this work, for the sake of humanity--better lives for each other and for the generations who come after us." Admirers, journalists, and even bemused cynics marvel at her intensity, her reverence, and her fanatical devotion to very fresh, organically grown, and local ingredients. One gets the sense that "processed food" is an oxymoron of the most hideous kind in Waters' vocabulary. "I do feel obsessive," she says. "And I think about things a long time before I do them." Waters's obsession shows in her home-away-from-home, Chez Panisse. The restaurant is a physical embodiment of Waters's ideal world. The wooden Arts and Crafts-style building boasts a dining room filled with fresh flowers. Alice's restaurant serves a fixed menu that changes according to whatever is fresh and available on that day--no exceptions, no substitutions, just like at a friend's dinner party at home. The kitchen looks like the set of the French movie after which the place is named, and it is lined with old brick ovens for pizzas and roasts, with antique cabinets and bureaus to hold utensils and silverware. Waters's attention to culinary detail is executed with well-trained precision, but also with the joie de vivre of a big, bustling family, everyone invested with a sense of pride and responsibility for the day's meal, and for The Cause. Every lettuce is sorted, leaf by leaf, every bean picked and pulled by hand. Even the bartender upstairs sits with a big basket of fava beans, popping them out of their shells while he awaits orders. The fame and fortune of the restaurant has, if anything, made Waters only more strict about the perfection of every single plate. "Now that it's a destination for people from all over the world," says her personal assistant Cristina Salas-Porra, "she is always impressing on us that these people may only be able to come here once, and therefore how important it is for everything to be absolutely perfect, every night." And yet, the real world creeps in to Chez Panisse as well. The fact of the matter is the restaurant is very expensive--a prix fixe dinner costs up to $68 per person (excluding beverages, tax, and tip). The more casual cafe upstairs is cheaper, but still beyond the reach of the masses that Waters so desperately wants to recruit. And because it's expensive, and because it's a world-class restaurant, it draws the rich and hoity-toity, and as much as Waters talks about convivial community, everyone knows that the rich, influential, and famous are bound to finagle a table, and a good one at that, without a reservation. But, after meeting Waters, one finds it hard to believe that any reputation of pretentiousness the restaurant may have originates with her. "I know, it makes me sad, but the thing is, we really don't make very much money. A lot goes into cooking this way, and we in this country have so undervalued our organic growers--who are the true stewards of the land--that people aren't used to paying a real price for food." How much of a toll has running a gastronomic revolution taken on its leader? "The largest sacrifice was," Waters says--and here she pauses, turning her face, chin in hand, into the window's afternoon sun--"of the family," alluding unavoidably to her recent divorce. "The restaurant business is notoriously difficult on family life. A lot of people's kids end up falling through the cracks in this business." And there is some desperation in Waters's laugh when she jokes that she started Chez Panisse nearly three decades ago so she could have dinner with her friends. "Little did I know that I would never see them again!" Waters knows, however, that her revolution needs her, and that celebrity is one of her most effective weapons. "It's a very mixed feeling, a very difficult feeling," she says. "It's great to have the attention of the people you want to impress, to have their ear for the things you believe are so important...but it's, well, it's too much...." Abruptly, she sits up straight. "I'm going to take some time off," Waters announces, putting a resolute fist to the table. "I've just decided this, right this minute. After this book tour, in the first part of 2000." And what do revolutionaries do on vacation? "I would like to do nothing," she says, her face flushed. "I don't remember what it's like to do nothing!" But Waters's weariness belies the most probable truth: that "nothing" isn't really what she'd be doing had she not returned to Berkeley and founded Chez Panisse. She smiles wistfully, thinking about what might have happened had she stayed in Greece and not begun her crusade. "Oh, I don't know, cooking crepes in a little cafe, maybe," she muses. "Whatever it would be, it would be something with the immediate connection that comes from cooking in the fire." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- As Alumna of the Year for 1999, Alice Waters '67 will be the honored guest and featured speaker at the California Alumni Association's Charter Banquet, to be held March 24 at the San Francisco Marriott Hotel. For reservations and further information, call 510/642-1892. |
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