A Conversation with Alice Waters

Alice Waters is an icon of the farm-to-table movement. Her restaurant, Chez Panisse, has been a pioneering force in California cuisine for five decades. She was the first woman named “Best Chef in America” in 1992 by the James Beard Foundation. She later received their Humanitarian Award and in 2009 she was recognized by the French Legion of Honor. In 2015, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama for her achievement in raising Americans’ awareness of healthy, local, seasonal eating and sustainable agriculture. She is the founder of the Edible Garden Project and the School Lunch Initiative, teaching schoolchildren to grow and prepare natural healthy foods. Alice has shared her ideas — and her recipes — in over a dozen bestselling books, including The Art of Simple Food, which she allowed us to reprint as part of our Flamingo Editions in 2022.

RICHARD: Hi Alice! This book is mostly about the stuff that you love. About how food woke me up and got me back to my senses.

ALICE: That’s my life!

Richard: Beforehand I was deeply out of touch with my body, and with life. I was deeply unhappy. I’ve been writing about how tasting food again, enjoying food again, woke me up from my slumber.

Alice: It really does, doesn’t it?

Richard: Someone once asked you “How can we change culture?” And you said, “By eating a meal together.” Do you still feel that way?

Alice: Well, it’s probably a little more precise than just eating a meal. It’s eating a meal that has been prepared by people who live nearby and care about how they grow the food organically and regeneratively, supporting them, and then gathering together and eating together.

Richard: You’ve often said, “What you put in your mouth is what you put into the world.” Is that the same idea?

Alice: I do believe that. We are at a point in this world where we have to intentionally make decisions about what we buy and how we live our lives if we want to have a future.

Richard: Because of the way mass-produced food is currently grown and priced? Everything gets cheaper, the quality gets poorer, and the farmers make no money.

Alice: Yes, we’ve been indoctrinated… I’m sure you’ve read my book We Are What We Eat…

Richard: Of course.

Alice: As I discussed there, beginning in the 1950’s, we started eating fast food, and we as a culture started digesting the values that came with fast food. We adopted the idea that more is better and time is money, and everything should be fast, cheap, and easy. It’s all “me, me, me” and “I want it now,” without regard for anyone else in the system. It’s so unbelievably irresponsible. And very selfish.

Richard: Why?

Alice: Because we’re not applying that mentality solely to food. It’s how we think about the world.

Richard: How do we solve that?

Alice: In my mind, we solve it by feeding children in schools. Real food that’s only local, regenerative, organic, and using the school’s system as the economic stimulus for the farmers. Buying directly. No Costco.

Richard: Basically what you’ve been doing at Chez Panisse for over 50 years.

Alice: Yes. We’re just going to the farm, picking up the vegetables, and taking our food scraps back so they can compost them. When we started doing that 50 years ago, every organic farmer in California wanted to sell to us because they felt that we were giving them the real price of the food and were so grateful, and that’s the partnership. It’s community-supported agriculture. I say to that grower, “I am taking everything you have.”

Richard: My mother and father are farmers In Australia, so it was always clear to me that growers crave consistency more than anything else. At Flamingo we have 120 farms now, and we buy directly from them each week.

Alice: Consistency. Exactly.

Richard: Most of our buying volume is for ingredients we use in our body products - like olive oil and essential oils, that sort of stuff. We’re at the volume now where we can say, “We’ll take all the sage or lavender you’re able to harvest for the next five years, and we will not ask you to negotiate or change the price.” That sort of consistency is the sort of thing my parents used to crave when I was a kid.

Alice: Exactly. And also buy whatever they have growing right now. We once learned how to cook nettles because that’s what a farmer had to sell, and we ended up making the most incredible nettle pizza. At different times of the year, they would have different special things. They grew up to twenty colors of chicory certain times of year. Every day we could have a different colored salad. A dream relationship. When you give the farmers that kind of reassurance, that’s all it takes for them to do their very best. They also communicate their understanding of the food that they grow, and that’s been a whole education for Chez Panisse in and of itself.

Richard: I had a conversation yesterday with Gonzalo Samaranch Granados, who owns Mestiza de Indias, a beautiful regenerative farm down in Mexico, surrounded by 800 acres of jungle. He’s amazing. He told me how much he disliked hydroponics because he wants to taste the soil on his food, because that’s how we sense the care taken by people growing and tending to food.

Alice: Yes, all your senses.

Richard: You said previously, “We’re sensorily deprived as a nation, a world, where we’re not touching anything anymore except our iPhones. We’re not really engaged with our food. We’ve lost our democracy. And we lost our connection with ourselves and each other in such a short period of time.”

Alice: Well, that’s really the truth. You know, I’m a Montessori teacher, and what I’ve learned back in the 1960s when I took the course in London was that our senses are our pathways into our mind. When we are not using our hands and our mouths and our smell and our ears, we’re not able to learn like we need to. Children who grow up in hunger and poverty are sensorily deprived as adults. And that’s what’s happened in this country. We are all sensorily deprived, not from poverty and hunger, but from the fast food culture that we live in, and we’re on our computers all the time. We are not engaged with our senses. We are not seeing the beauty around us. We’re not going outside, seeing Redwood trees.

Richard: The work is to have all your senses engaged.

Alice: Exactly. Exactly. And to focus again on kids, you see how much they love to be outside. We should be teaching outside all the time.

Richard: When I hear those stories of you at Chez Panisse – setting the flowers, adjusting the music, burning rosemary do change the smell in the dining room – it’s much more than just about tasting food.

Alice: Yes, I had that same kind of experience recently. Way too much food. It was loud as can be. I was having ringing in my ears. It was intense. It wasn’t relaxing, and conversation – I couldn’t even hear the people across the table.

Richard: I completely agree. Since we were talking about sensory pleasure, what’s your view on Ozempic?

Alice: I have no idea what it is. I’ve never heard of it.

Richard: It’s the miracle drug that everyone’s on that makes you lose 20 pounds in a month.

Alice: Why would anyone want that?

Richard: Well, you lose so much weight. You don’t want to eat. But you also don’t want to taste, and you don’t want to smell. It’s the death of your senses. I don’t think there is anything sexy about restriction. That point of view might be controversial.

Alice: If we were taught when we were young the way the French children are taught to eat, or the Japanese children particularly, we’d have a different relationship to food.

Richard: Being more mindful about what we eat? And eating good quality food?

Alice: Yes. I was just in Japan actually. I was on a book tour that was unlike any other book tour – it was so beautiful.

Richard: How so?

Alice: They hired the head of Slow Food Japan to do my book tour with me. We went to farms, and I met the mayor of the cities, and we went to schools that had garden classes. I just couldn’t believe their values were so alike mine.

Richard: In what way?

Alice: Commitment to taste. Belief in organic regenerative food. The beauty in everything. They believe that education is the place to really engage children. They had an Edible Schoolyard atop the highest building in Japan, and the kids would walk there from ten blocks away so that they could take care of their garden, and it was so absolutely charming to meet them, their enthusiasm. It’s nice to see people who still care about food and farmers and understand that they are the most important citizens, the farmers and the teachers.

Richard: I think often about parents telling their kids to be doctors or lawyers, but I think the world really needs more farmers and gardeners.

Alice: Exactly. Farmers and gardeners. When we value them enough to pay them a living wage, that will happen. We should be talking about this in politics and policy.

Richard: President Obama awarded you the National Humanities Medal. I saw him placing the medal over your head. That must have been a moment.

Alice: That was a great moment in my life. He just gets it. This idea is absolutely essential to a democracy, the distribution of healthy food. When you feed children real food, you have the opportunity to feed all the values of democracy at the table. You pass the food. You say please and thank you. Every person at the table has an opinion. You listen to them. That’s how you begin to understand all the differences there are. I’ve been working at the American Academy in Rome, do you know it?

Richard: No.

Alice: Richard, you should know about that project and stop by when you’re in Italy, because that’s the most successful education institution in the world. The building was purchased by a group of architects at the turn of the century, who said, “We want a place that brings people together who have different ideas”. So people come and they live there for a year, in all disciplines. They eat together at lunch, talking and learning from each other. A guest like yourself could stop by and listen and eat. In the beginning, they had bad American cafeteria food. Nobody ate together. There was no conversation. We changed the food about 14 years ago, and now they stay at the lunch table for two hours or so.

Richard: I lived in Italy in my 20s. I moved from my parents’ farm in Australia to Italy. I always loved how we would leave our desks and have a proper meal with wine and pasta in the middle of the day. No one would sit at their desk and eat a sandwich, and it was beautiful. I’ve always said Italy taught me how to eat, taught me how to dress, taught me how to shake someone’s hand, and you said somewhere that Italians are easy to hire because they’re born with that sensibility.

Alice: They are. I think it’s been helped along by the Slow Food Movement, of course. By Carlo Petrini. But I’ve been really educated by the French, and the difference to me is the French have more of an understanding of how much to eat. The Italians just go over the edge! But both of them are at all times tasting and questioning and talking about the subtle flavors of food. I just love that curiosity. But the French would look at all the menus around town, and they’d say, “Oh, they have the best oysters because they bring them in today. We should eat there.” I like that discernment.

Richard: There’s a paradox about Alice Waters. You speak about joy of simple things like oysters. But there must be a real, iron-hard determination under your skin to keep a business running for 50 years. And to have that kind of influence in the world.

Alice: Well, I love what I’m doing. It’s a matter of loving your work. And we have never valued that. Most Americans don’t have meaningful work, and I mean really meaningful work. Most of them are just driving a long time to get to an Amazon factory, working there all day, no windows, coming home. I’d just be so depressed by that, and there isn’t a day – well there’s a few days that I’m frustrated or whatever – but I always like it. And if I don’t like it, I change it. So for instance, if we’re cooking meals on Monday and it gets too difficult for everybody, let’s not do it anymore. Let’s figure out some other way to make money.

Richard: That clarity.

Alice: I’ve got a real clarity about what gives me pleasure. I made the best decision I’ve ever made when I had a baby when I was 40 years old. I could not work six days a week. So I decided that we were going to change the system. We were going to be open six days, and each chef was going to work three days but be paid for five days.

Richard: Wow. Wait, everyone got paid the full week, but only worked half the time?

Alice: Yes. So Paul Bertolli and I shared a chef’s job. We each worked three days. We were paid for five, and we have kept that system now for 40 years. And I know we have two pastry chefs – same thing, two cafe chefs, two downstairs chefs.

Richard: I’m so interested in this model. How has that changed the staff? Are they better at work?

DAlice: Oh yes. They can go out. They can eat in other restaurants. They can have time to think about what they want to cook. They work with the other chef, their co-chef. “What was really good this week that you loved cooking that I should continue?” And the other chef says, “Oh, I’ll make the stock for you. We have some fish left. I’ll do that.” It’s caused us to become a family really. We’re sharing everything, and it makes the restaurant almost regenerative, I like to think. Because you’re not just having one chef’s ideas – always two. And probably six. I know that making that decision when I was 40 was the most important decision of Chez Panisse’s life, and we will have longevity because of it.

Richard: Wow. That’s amazing. And I love that idea. But then my head goes to our business and how we could afford to do it. Doubling our staff costs would be impossible right now. It would require some serious planning.

Alice: Yes, it will require changes. The question is, do you want to spend money on people or on other things? For me, it’s people. I want them to live in this world in a good way. I just wanted to make a little restaurant. I have all the money I need. I mean, clearly I never thought about making money! (Both laugh).

Richard: What’s that joke, “Do you know how to make a small fortune in restaurants?”

Alice: How?

Richard: Start with a large one. (Both laugh)

Alice: Well, I started with good luck. I bought the building because my parents had given me money – they mortgaged their house, and I bought the building for $28,000, and I paid them back the money. Needless to say, it’s worth a lot more now!

Richard: But the restaurant wasn’t an instant hit, right? I remember reading that there was trouble for a few years?

Alice: I mean, not real trouble, but we only have one menu, and you either like it or you don’t.

Richard: The same way it should be at home.

Alice: Yes! Just like that. But there were always people there, I think partly because I had a friend who was a film guy, and he brought every filmmaker or visiting dignitary to the restaurant.

Richard: I saw a photo of you and the Dalai Lama eating. What did he tell you?

Alice: Oh, it was so beautiful, because the night before he came to Chez Panisse, my husband and I broke up. And I didn’t know whether I could come to the restaurant and be out front with the bouquet for the Dalai Lama, but I had to. And I went up and I was seated next to him, and I had my hand on the table, and he put his hand on my hand, and I know he knew that I was in pain. I don’t know how he knew that. What did he say? He kissed me on the cheek and he basically said, “Everything’s going to be fine.”

Richard: To share a meal with him, what a gift.

Alice: Well it was because he was speaking at Berkeley. And very often because of the proximity to the university, we have had the most extraordinary guests, which have brought, again, a kind of sense of community to the restaurant, and I’m always willing to do a late party for the Dalai Lama! But I think people see people they know, friends, and it feels more like a community eating there. I think that’s something that’s not impossible to cultivate, but it’s really important to me. I’ve walked through the dining room and recognized the people who have been coming for years.

Richard: My book is called The Guide to Becoming Alive. Is that what it feels like to you to be fully alive?

Alice: It is. And there’s no question about it. Especially during the pandemic. Living alone is very difficult. And to be able to go to the restaurant and or to be able to communicate – always. And all of that. I go to the farmers market every week, and I see my friends and farmers, and it really makes you feel alive.

Richard: That’s so nice. I love that. I really loved our chat.

Alice: Thank you so much Richard.