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• Alice Waters From the earliest days of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, Alice Waters has stood out from the crowd. Taking her lead from the farmers and small producers who supplied the restaurant, over the decades Alice Waters has come to symbolise the importance of true seasonality, regionality and sheer dedication to fine produce and the best farming methods. Alice has been named as one of Time’s 100 Most Influential people and was this year’s Wall Street Journal Innovator of the Year. Since launching her Edible Schoolyard project in 1996, she’s extended her influence to the cooks, farmers and eaters of the future, even inspiring Michelle Obama to plant a kitchen garden at the White House. And she comes to Australia from Terra Madre – the biennial gathering in Italy of farmers and food producers from around the globe created by the international Slow Food movement. Meet this truly iconic figure, one of the most influential food thinkers of our times. Introduction by Stephanie Alexander. Presented in partnership with the Age Good Food Month.
• Alice Waters: The delicious revolutionary Alice Waters is an unlikely revolutionary. But then, her revolution was born in a gentler time. It was the era of protests against the Vietnam War and racial segregation. But it was also the era of peace and love, of community and communes. It was the 1960s – when the youth of America learned about the power of gathering. The power of gathering found a natural home in a little restaurant and cafe in the university town of Berkeley, California. Opened in 1971, it was named Chez Panisse, after a favourite character in a French cinema classic. Chez Panisse focused on simple cooking, seasonality, good ingredients and connections with the people who grew them. Although inspired by travels and eating in France, its style had nothing to do with stiff Michelin-esque fine dining. Eating here was casual, communal and inclusive. Rockpool's Neil Perry is a long-time fan, saying he's eaten at Chez Panisse at least a dozen times. "Whether it's a simple goat's cheese salad, a piece of sole or salmon when the West Coast salmon is running, it's always really wonderful," he says. "It's plain to see that it's all about seasonality, the quality of the ingredients and the craft of cooking, hiding nothing behind that quality." If all that sounds wildly contemporary, it's because the restaurant's founder, Alice Waters, had a head start on many of us. She understood the power of gathering friends and diners around a restaurant table but also linking in chefs and farmers. "She was ahead of her time", says Danielle Alvarez, a former Chez Panisse chef now working in Sydney. "It was always about, 'How do we help the farmers, what can we buy from them?' Those conversations can change things on a daily basis. There is no calling up and ordering from a generic place. If a farmer doesn't have carrots you don't get carrots." It was long before most chefs, and food writers, used the term "farm to table" or professed serious affiliations with growers and producers, let alone championed organics and sustainable agriculture. If anyone truly deserves the all-time title of paddock-to-plate poster girl, it's this fine-featured, sweetly steely 70 year old turned serious food activist. "She has lived the collaboration dream that is really quite extraordinary," says Perry. "And she gets everybody to believe it. It's a lesson in the difference between talking the talk and walking the walk – to see what true integrity is." Shocked by what she saw beyond the Berkeley bubble, Waters then began challenging contemporary food systems and consumption. That was in the 1990s, when she issued her famous manifesto on the ethics of eating. "The way people are living their lives, how unhappy they are, destroying the land, the obesity epidemic …" says Waters, "The fast-food culture permeates every aspect of life. People see everything as fast, cheap and easy. And they want everything fast, cheap and easy. We have become what we eat and we will pay for it." Through her powerful networks, people began to listen. "She's a big-time force," says Alvarez. "In chef culture, chef life, there isn't such a drive to be part of that conversation [about change]. But she's always been the driver of that conversation. She speaks to politicians, Nobel Prize-winning authors, Michelle Obama! And she creates conversations around how food affects everything and how change can come." These days, though, Alice Waters would prefer to call herself an educator. "I'm definitely an activist," she says, "but I'm not trying to overthrow anything. I'm trying to win people over. And that is an educational process." RELATED CONTENT The art of eating And education begins at school. The Edible Schoolyard project was founded in the mid-1990s to transform unused space at a Berkeley public school into a food garden. The concept has spread to dozens of schools, integrating the planting, growing and cooking of food across the curriculum – not dissimilar to Stephanie Alexander's Kitchen Garden Project here in Australia. The next stage is a truly ambitious dream: free school lunch. And not just for American kids (the concept has been adopted in California), but for every child on the planet. "It's the most beautiful way to deal with all the issues – health, the environment, poverty, hunger," Waters says. "We have to go deeply into the schools and really bring children into a new relationship with food and nature when they are young. And how better than through a delicious sustainable school lunch and engaging them that way?" Architect of her own "delicious revolution", Waters also wants to recruit all those with influence in today's food world. "Everyone who has an awareness and celebrity should use it to the greatest advantage of all of us. We are in a very precarious position. I would love to go back to the kitchen and cook but I am so worried about the future. I can't be an island. I can't just keep Chez Panisse and all our farmers and life in Berkeley when what's happening around the world is totally affecting that ideal." "She's an inspiration, and true culinary royalty" says Neil Perry who is delighted Waters is finally making it to Australia. An ethical eating manifesto If you choose to eat mass-produced fast food, you are supporting a network of supply and demand that is destroying local communities and traditional ways of life all over the world – a system that replaces self-sufficiency with dependence. And you are supporting a method of agriculture that is ecologically unsound – that depletes the soil and leaves harmful chemical residues in our food. But if you decide to eat fresh food in season – and only in season – that is locally grown by farmers who take care of the earth, then you are contributing to the health and stability of local agriculture and local communities. From The Ethics of Eating: an address by Alice Waters, May 22, 1994 Alice Waters is in Australia from November 12-17. She will speak at Sydney Opera House on November 12. See sydneyoperahouse.com. She will speak at The Athenaeum on November 17, in partnership with the Wheeler Centre. See wheelercentre.com.
• Chef and activist Alice Waters heads to Australia with nourishing message She successfully lobbied Michelle Obama to plant a vegetable garden on the White House lawn and sparked front-page debate about school lunches across the United States. Now Alice Waters, one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people of the year, is heading to Australia for the first time. And she has a message to share - about edible education. She says children and adults need to wean themselves off junk food and learn how to properly nourish themselves. "By nourishing children in schools and teaching them the lessons of nature in the garden, and culture at the table, we can turn the crisis around in a generation," says Waters, 70. "It is the most effective, positive and democratic way to do it, and I think people are realising that now, which motivates me more than ever." In 1995, Waters founded the Edible Schoolyard Project at a school near her restaurant in Berkeley, California. Her idea was to turn the parking lot into a garden involving students, teachers and the community. Waters' vision is for projects such as hers and the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation in Australia to become a global edible education movement. She said efforts to improve school lunches showed the message about knowing where our food comes from, and how it nourishes us, was getting across. "We need to transform school lunch from an afterthought that aids our addiction to junk to an egalitarian mechanism for the nourishment of the nation. We’ve made huge progress in awareness over the past few years." Mrs Obama's efforts to grow vegetables at the White House had also helped spread the message. "The symbolism of Michelle Obama planting a vegetable garden on the White House lawn was incredibly potent. It resonated around the world and gave enormous credibility to the idea. "I think there was already a wide acknowledgment that in food we find the root of many of our problems but I think the First Lady’s campaign sent a positive message that food also has the solution.
• Slow-mo food: Alice Waters and the 'delicious revolution' The mother of the "delicious revolution" is coming to Australia. And while the food philosophy of Alice Waters sounds simple and sensible, in this fast-paced, takeaway world it is seen as extreme. On an industrial street in a waiting-to-be-gentrified neighbourhood of Brooklyn, a crowd has gathered outside a trendy Italian eatery, its walls daubed in subway-style graffiti and its interior a combination of SoHo style and commune grunge. In the restaurant's garden, which is lined with herb trays and two bright green shipping containers, people mark out their turf with tie-dye patterned picnic blankets. Many are already lunching on slices of wood-fired pizza, oozing melted cheese and organic vegetables. Waters with Prince Charles in 2005. Waters with Prince Charles in 2005. Photo: AFP Even though it's a weekday morning, there is a charge in the air. The gathering crowd has the feel of a movement. As a young woman with two-tone hair explains, as she scrawls her name on an email list, "We're not foodies, we're food activists." This event is a silver jubilee celebration of sorts: the 25th anniversary of the Slow Food movement, which opposes the globalisation of food production and the rise of multinational giants such as Monsanto, and promotes traditional, local and organic alternatives. The warm-up act is an African-American teacher with the dreamy stage name "Lady Moon", who became a food activist after witnessing the garbage served to pupils at her school. Don't Eat Plastic is the title of her song. Waters at a farmers' market in New York in 2007. Waters at a farmers' market in New York in 2007. Photo: Evan Sung/The New York Times/Headpress Then come the main attractions, a duo that inspires the same kind of devotion among food activists that Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell would evoke in folk fans. First up is Carlo Petrini, founder of the international Slow Food movement, best known for mounting a protest against the fast-food chain McDonald's when it opened an outlet near Rome's Spanish Steps in the mid-1980s. "The current food system is a criminal food system," this grey-bearded Italian intellectual booms with the revolutionary aplomb of a foodie Garibaldi. Next to him, wearing a flowing blue salwar kameez and red-tinted spectacles, is Alice Waters, an elegant 70-year-old regarded as the mother of what has been called the "delicious revolution". Compared with Petrini's, her voice sounds gentle, almost frail. But real determination lies behind every word. Today she is politely demanding that Barack Obama issue a presidential decree placing edible education on the curriculum of every school in the US, much as John F. Kennedy championed physical education. "When you edibly educate kids, they have a different set of values," she says, in her lilting Californian accent. "They have slow food values." Petrini nods in vigorous agreement. "You Americans are very lucky to have Alice Waters," he shouts, to loud applause. "She's a fountain of inspiration." Advertisement On November 12, as part of Good Food Month, Alice Waters will address a far larger crowd in a far grander setting: the Sydney Opera House. But her message about ethical eating will be the same. "I've been working on a big speech about how we teach slow food values in a fast food culture," she says, sipping a decaf cappuccino. "Of how we can move away from that and create something else." Her Australian devotees have been trying for decades to lure her to Sydney and Melbourne, her other stopping off point, but the flight has always deterred her. Now, with leaders of the G20 club of nations about to gather in Brisbane, she considers the long-haul journey worthwhile. "There needs to be a big loud voice when there's a meeting going on like that," she reckons. "I want to say the things that could really trigger things." Triggering things has been her life's work, dating back to the early '70s when she opened Chez Panisse, a neighbourhood restaurant close to the San Francisco campus she protested on as a student. Back in the '60s, the University of California, Berkeley was a hotbed of radicalism, a milieu in which she thrived. Swept up in the Free Speech Movement, which railed against university regulations curbing political activism on campus, she was transfixed by the oratory of its leader, Mario Savio. The US had become a "utopia of sterilised, automated contentment", shouted Savio, a cri de coeur that for Waters has echoed down the years. After Berkeley, Waters moved to France, where a new gastronomic world opened up for her. "I lucked out," she says, wistfully. "I went to a place where people went to the market twice a day for fresh produce, whose meal would be spoiled unless they had a hot baguette." Chez Panisse, a tree house-like haven that routinely ranks in the world's top 50 restaurants, is where her northern Californian radicalism fused together with her love of the Gallic appreciation of food. In its kitchen, she pioneered the farm-to-table ethos, centred on seasonal, locally produced food and small-scale sustainable agriculture, which made her name. California cuisine, as it called, is really Alice Waters cuisine. "It was always much more than the food," says the Australian chef Stephanie Alexander, who has eaten at Chez Panisse four times and can remember what she ate each time. "It was a philosophy of sharing, of seeking out and developing relationships with suppliers she trusted to deliver the freshest, the best and, increasingly, the most environmentally sustainable. Her restaurant engaged all of the senses. It was simple and beautiful." Chez Panisse brought her international fame. "Alice is the most important person in the food world living today," says the London-based Australian chef Skye Gyngell, who bought the Chez Panisse cookbook when she was 18 and regards it as a near-sacred text. Gyngell, who has just opened a new restaurant at Somerset House in London, keeps just 10 cookbooks on her shelf. Four are by Waters. "She's political but she does it in such an elegant way. There's an iron fist delivered in a velvet glove. She really wants to bring people to the table, because that is where great things will happen." Even Waters is surprised at how quickly Slow Food has become a worldwide movement. It now has more than 100,000 members in 150 countries: "The whole movement has multiplied geometrically in the past five years." This culinary awakening is linked to broader fears about global warming, she reckons, and also ties in with the inequality debate sparked by the Occupy movement and Thomas Piketty's unexpected bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. "Young people are completely aware of what's happening to the world," she says, with an idealistic air that harks back to her student days. "It feels delicious and hopeful, and very welcoming, and very honest and unsuspicious, and very educational." Not only can the Slow Food movement now boast critical mass, but also the support of influential backers. Prince Charles, who Waters describes as "unbelievably prescient", has long been a supporter. The Daily Show's Jon Stewart, an anchor who now wields Cronkite-like clout, is also a friend. America's great junk-food president Bill Clinton has become a foodie convert since his quadruple coronary bypass surgery in 2004, embracing a diet that is almost vegan. "That was definitely a wake up for him," she says. "He realised food wasn't just a commodity." Hillary Clinton, who helped small farmers in New York during her years as the state's senator, is another sympathiser. Waters is also credited with persuading another First Lady, Michelle Obama, to plant an organic vegetable garden at the White House - although, with customary modesty, she says her role has been exaggerated. Meeting the then Senator Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign, Waters was impressed by his familiarity with the writings of foodie intellectuals such as Michael Pollan and Wendell Berry. He could also quote statistics about America's childhood obesity epidemic - how a third of US children are obese or overweight. Pope Francis, who recently feasted on a basket of food that she personally prepared for him, has also become an ethical eating convert. Soon, she hopes, there will be an organic vegetable garden in the grounds of the Vatican. With Carlo Petrini, she personally surveyed the gardens to find an appropriate spot. The pope and the president, she reckons, could form a powerful duumvirate: "The only time I've seen Obama really smile since he became president was when he handed the pope seeds from the White House garden," she says, recalling the president's visit to the Vatican in March, and the gift he handed the new pontiff. "I really haven't seen him smile since he was elected. It's a very sad thing." As an apprentice at Sydney's Rockpool restaurant, Kylie Kwong was told by chef Neil Perry not to bother with cooking school, but instead to read Alice Waters. "At the heart of Alice's message is the very deep human emotion and desire for 'connection', " says Kwong, now a friend of Waters. "It encourages us to be a part of an all-embracing, inclusive, uplifting, completely delicious and very reachable, accessible life experience - and that's why her message continues to grow some 40 years on. It is rooted in reality and humanitarian values." Waters was also a formative influence on Barossa-based cook Maggie Beer and Sydney-based chef Matt Moran. Simplicity, Moran says, is the secret of her success. "It's not cutting edge and it's not tricksy. It's real. It's all about the produce." Her legacy is found not only in the many chefs she has influenced, but also the success of her "edible schoolyards". The first opened in 1996 at a school a few blocks from Chez Panisse, where she transformed a derelict car park into a half-hectare garden, which in full bloom has more than 100 varieties of vegetables and flowers. Through the planting of these organic gardens, Waters, who once taught in a Montessori school in London, has attempted to place an appreciation of produce at the very core of the curriculum. In lessons such as "Making Mathematics Delicious", algebra and science are taught in kitchens and gardens, not just classrooms and laboratories. "We're talking about bringing them back to the beauty of nature; we're trying to enchant them," says Waters, again with almost flower power wonder. "Taste and the pleasure of food is a right." There are now more than 2000 edible schoolyard programs in all 50 US states, and 29 other countries. In Australia, her influence is evident in the Kitchen Garden Foundation set up by Stephanie Alexander. "Once Alice had made her first forays into the world of edible education, she wrote about it persuasively," says The Cook's Companion author. "It echoed my own growing realisation that something had to be done to introduce understanding and joy for children here in Australia." Now, with the help of federal funding, 10 per cent of primary schools in Australia have a kitchen garden project. Waters' latest fight is to improve the quality of school cafeteria lunches. "It all comes down to education and schools," she says. "We need to teach that good food is a right in life." Witnessing this sprightly septuagenarian walk around the Saturday morning farmers' market in New York's Union Square is like seeing a small child visit FAO Schwarz toy store for the first time. Dressed in black training shoes, black leggings and a black puffer jacket - a foodie commando - she scampers from stall to stall, holding up a bright yellow variegated squash one minute and marvelling at a mauve cauliflower the next. Stallholders, recognising her, treat her with same deference a restaurateur in Little Italy would reserve for Martin Scorsese. Small wonder. She is credited with kick-starting farmers' markets across the US. When this market opened in the mid-'70s, just seven farmers came to sell their produce. Now, it serves 250,000 customers each week. What is also striking about this whirlwind tour is how many farmers she knows personally. She takes almost parental pride in their produce. Yet for all her efforts, New York remains a city where fast food is king. Its blue-collar masses feed on junk food. Civil rights groups recently mobilised to rebuff a ban on super-sized soda drinks proposed by former mayor Michael Bloomberg. Only the wealthy can afford to do their weekly grocery shops at organic supermarkets, and many of the customers who flock to Union Square greenmarket belong to the Volvo set. A criticism of Alice Waters, then, is that she stands at the head of a prosperous elite, a foodie 1 per cent. Waters has a stock response: "Isn't it elitism when four or five companies own the whole food system?" The other, more pointed criticism of Waters is that she is obsessively doctrinaire. American food writer Anthony Bourdain has railed against her gastronomic correctness. "There's something very Khmer Rouge about Alice Waters that has become unrealistic," he said in 2009. The writer George Packer has described her as a "Bohemian scold". Todd Kliman, the food and wine editor for Washingtonian magazine, says: "There is a blinkeredness about her and her acolytes," adding that what he calls the neo-Agrarians have not "reckoned with matters of class - nor with the frenetic, fragmentary nature of life as the majority of Americans are forced to live it". But trailblazers and iconoclasts inevitably make themselves big targets. "Anthony Bourdain would find something wrong with mayonnaise," says Naomi Starkman, the editor-in-chief of the food blog Civil Eats. "The charge of elitism falls by the wayside when you look at what she's calling for: edible schoolyards and free school meals. She's fighting for equality." In Australia, where healthy food has more mass appeal, an admiring crowd will greet her. Her slow food message also seems well timed. "People want to know now where their food comes from," says Matt Moran, who himself has just published a book on his kitchen garden. "It's not a fad now. It's a reality." Kylie Kwong agrees: "In the past few years alone we've seen the rise of farmers' markets, school gardens, changes in institutional food, a consumer focus on local, sustainable, organic. All of those developments and changes seemed like a wild dream even a decade ago but it's happening." However, Waters does not expect the Abbott government to be so friendly, because she plans to emphasise global warming and the threat it poses to sustainable agriculture. It clearly rankles her that Abbott has described climate change as "absolute crap" and didn't even turn up for the UN's climate summit in New York. As we part ways, and she steps onto the streets of New York with a knapsack full of fresh produce, her impish face lights up. An idea has come to mind: "I should prepare a picnic basket for Tony Abbott."