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Alice Waters

Alice Waters, creator of Chez Panisse, the legendary restaurant in Berkeley, California, was the first of a new generation of chefs focusing on fresh, local ingredients. Her restaurant and books spawned modern American cuisine she has become one of most influential chefs of our time. Her philosophy of always using the highest quality, fresh, seasonal ingredients, grown and harvested in an ecologically sound manner, has made her the mentor of a generation of adventurous cooks.

Alice Waters has also been an active member of the community, most notably as founder of the Edible Schoolyard Project at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, California, which seeks to involve children directly in planting, gardening, harvesting, cooking, and eating, while instilling such values as courtesy, generosity, thrift, respect, and reverence for the goodness of nature. The Edible Schoolyard was conceived as a pilot project, and serves as a model for schools across the country.

She has also received numerous prestigious awards, which include being named one of the ten best chefs in the world in 1986, by the magazine Cuisine et Vins du France and Best Chef in America and Best Restaurant in America, from the James Beard Foundation, in 1992.

The below text is excerpted from Our Sustainable Table by Robert Clark. This title is now out of print but can be obtained through used book stores or amazon.com's online bookstore.

"Perhaps more than any other kind of foodstuff, produce in general and its flavor in particular have suffered under postwar American agriculture. Although we've been able to have as much cosmetically perfect, out-of-season fruit and vegetables as anyone could possibly want, the flavor, freshness, variety, and wholesomeness of produce have been terribly diminished…

Our emphasis - and, today, our insistence - on organically grown produce developed less out of any ideological commitment than out of the fact that this was the way almost everyone we knew gardened. We have never been interested in being a health or natural foods restaurant; rather, organic and naturally raised ingredients happen to be consistent with both what we want for our kitchen and what we want for our community and our larger environment. Such ingredients have never been an end in themselves, but they are a part of the way of life that inspired the restaurant and that we want the restaurant to inspire. Most of us have become so inured to the dogmas and self-justifications of agribusiness that we forget that, until 1940, most produce was, for all intents and purposes, organic, and, until the advent of the refrigerated boxcar, it was also of necessity fresh, seasonal, and local. There's nothing radical about organic produce: It's a return to traditional values of the most fundamental kind…

…farming isn't manufacturing: It is a continuing relationship with nature that has to be complete on both sides to work. People claim to know that plants are living things, but the system of food production, distribution, and consumption we have known in this country for the last forty years has attempted to deny that they are. If our food has lacked flavor - if, in aesthetic terms, it has been dead - that may be because it was treated as dead even while it was being grown. And perhaps we have tolerated such food - and the way its production has affected our society and environment - because our senses, our hearts, and our minds have been in some sense deadened, too.

I've always felt it was part of my job as a cook and restaurateur to try to wake people up to these things, to challenge them really to taste the food and to experience the kind of community that can happen in the kitchen and at the table. Those of us who work with food suffer from an image of being involved in an elite, frivolous pastime that has little relation to anything important or meaningful But in fact we are in a position to cause people to make important connections between what they are eating and a host of crucial environmental, social, and health issues. Food is at the center of these issues.

This isn't a matter of idealism or altruism but rather one of self-interest and survival. Restaurateurs have a very real stake in the health of the planet, in the source of the foodstuffs we depend on, and in the future of farmers, fishermen, and other producers. Hydroponic vegetables or fish raised in pens will never be a real substitute for the flavor and quality of the ingredients that are in increasing jeopardy today. Professionally and personally, both our livelihoods and our lives depend on the preservations of what we have and the restoration of what we have lost. The fate of farmers - and with them the fate of the earth itself - is not somebody else's problem: It is our fate, too."

For more information about Alice Waters, Chez Panisse Foundation, restaurant menus, and other goodies click here.