Go ask Alice

Are Alice Waters' gastronomic principles -- shop locally, eat organically -- too hard to live by? A frank talk with the renowned guru of fresh food.

By Farhad Manjoo

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Oct. 26, 2007 |

I had been prepared to skewer Alice Waters. Though I have eaten some of the best food I've ever encountered at her Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse, and though I have generally tried to live by the gastronomic principles that she's become famous championing, and though I believe that the world would be better off in nearly every way if more people listened to her, there is a limit to what can be expected of us -- of me! -- and I wanted to tell her, Alice Waters, you just want too much.

Alice Waters is not content for you to simply eat organic produce. No, no. It's got to be organic and local and seasonal, and really, for it to be any good at all, you have to get it from the farmer who pulled it out of the earth. And ideally that farmer would be a friend of yours. You and he would discuss the soil and seasons and his search for heirloom varieties, and he would give you tips for your own garden, where, of course, you'd spend many of your weekends.

Alice Waters doesn't want you to use store-bought stock, or mayonnaise from a jar, anything frozen (even peas!), or salad that comes in a bag. She would rather you stay away from nearly every kitchen appliance, including a blender -- a food mill or a Japanese mortar and pestle called a suribachi is wholly preferable.

Consider the eggs Alice Waters wants you to buy, the eggs she serves at Chez Panisse: eggs from chickens raised on a pasture, chickens who enjoy, among other humane conditions, freedom from having their beaks trimmed by their handlers. This is a practice performed at nearly every egg farm in the country, including the ones that sell the $4-a-dozen eggs you buy at so-called responsible stores like Whole Foods. Even in the San Francisco Bay Area, it is extremely difficult to find Waters-approved eggs -- for long periods of the year, production is so low that farms impose rationing and stop supplying most stores; you have to wake up very early even to find them at the farmers' market. "People don't have enough time for this!" I would tell Alice Waters. We don't have enough money, either. It's just too much.

And then I opened her new book, "The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes From a Delicious Revolution," and I fell into Alice Waters' world. Waters is known for the rhapsodic manner in which she talks about food, but her writing is every bit as engaging. "Poached eggs perched on a buttered toasted slice of tender bread is the perfect breakfast," she writes, and at that moment you'd move mountains to get those eggs to make such a breakfast.

More remarkable, though, is that she makes it seem, if not easy, at least not daunting. The book begins with a set of principles by which to live -- among them to eat locally and sustainably, eat seasonally, eat together with friends and family, and most important, to remember that "food should never be taken for granted." In the rest of it, Waters outlines straightforward ways that most of us can reach those goals. The most basic thing is this: Go to the farmers' market. Go often, go early, spend a long time there.

I spent several weeks cooking by the book, preparing Waters' recipes with the sort of ingredients she favors. I won't say it was easy -- especially when I couldn't get out of work to get to the market. It wasn't cheap, either, but it wasn't expensive. Every meal I made cost more than $10, but none cost more than $20.

Many times, I cheated in small ways. I bought a suribachi, but I also used the blender. In a risotto, I added frozen peas. In a polenta torta, I used conventional imported Parmigiano-Reggiano ($14 a pound) rather than organic ($24 a pound). I used organic canned tomatoes instead of fresh tomatoes in a pasta sauce, but Waters says that's OK to do out of tomato season.

The food was wonderful. If Waters' methods can be fussy, if her objectives can sometimes seem unattainably pure, the end result is inarguably fantastic. A Caesar salad I made from romaine I bought during an epiphanic morning at the farmers' market was as delicious as any salad I remember having at Chez Panisse. More amazing was that it came together in about 20 minutes, dressing and all. Linguine with clams in a tomato sauce spiked with fennel took three pots and an hour, but was so well worth it that I made it again the next day.

Earlier this week, I visited Waters at her office, which is set in a charming, woodsy annex building off Chez Panisse. She's in the middle of a long book tour, and had come into town briefly. She looked harried. The office buzzed with young assistants getting her set up to fly off to her next reading locations. I found her, as expected, unyielding -- this is a woman who believes food should be the No. 1 issue of the presidential campaign.

And yet, after buying and cooking and eating the sort of food she hails, you really can't help feeling that maybe it wouldn't be so hard to change your whole life around -- or at least to try. (You can listen to the interview here.)

You definitely have a goal for this book beyond recipes and technique. What is your objective?

I want people to focus on where the ingredients come from. That's really what's important to me. It's not so much what they're cooking, it's with what ingredients they're cooking. It can be a hot dog -- but where's that hot dog from? What kind of ranches are producing the meat? Are the animals being fed hormones and antibiotics out there on the range? Are they in feedlots? Are they enjoying the natural resources of the region? You know, what's in the hot dog? What's in the bun? What's in the mustard? What's in the ketchup?

That's what I'm interested in. Because every decision we make about the food that we eat has consequences. And they aren't just about people's personal health. There are consequences in terms of the healthcare system for all of us if people eat food that makes them sick. And there are environmental consequences. But I think the thing that people don't understand is that there are cultural consequences.

When we're eating fast food, we're not just eating the food, we're eating a set of values that comes with the food. And it's telling us that food should be cheap. It's telling us that food should be the same no matter where we are on the planet. It's telling us that advertising confers value. That it's OK to eat 24 hours a day. That there are unlimited resources. It's telling us that the work of the people who grow or raise the food is unimportant -- in fact we don't even need to know. And all of those values are informing what's happening in the world around us. We're ending up with malls instead of beautiful places to live in.

I've been cooking from this book for about a month now.

You have? Tell me, did the recipes work?

Yeah, they were wonderful. But as you say, it's less about the recipes than your ideas of where to get the food. And I've been following those ideas too. I went to the farmers' market several times.

You know this would be any old book of recipes if it weren't for the philosophy of food at the beginning. If you're just going into the store and buying those ingredients, if you're really a good cook you could probably make something. But what is beautiful is that this changes your life. It brings you into the whole community of people and hopefully brings you back to the dinner table.

Next page: Farmers' markets vs. Whole Foods