Working For Jobs

by Twilight Greenaway.

I don’t know Alice Waters. Yet I often feel like
I know Waters’ public self—the lilting voice, the distinctly emotive
diction, the studied bohemianism—a little too well.    

So I wasn’t surprised when I picked up Waters’ latest book, 40 Years of Chez
Panisse: The Power of Gathering, and felt like I was holding a personal
scrapbook. 

It’s a lovingly crafted book, full of rare
photographs and intimate details that chart the history of the restaurant. In
addition to pages of photos, menus, and highly stylized event posters
documenting the restaurant’s milestones (including the 10th, 20th, and 30th anniversary parties), Waters has curated a series of short written
memories from some of the more influential food professionals and
personalities, including Calvin Trillin, Ruth Reichl, Michael Pollan, and other
member of the extended “Chez” community. But that’s not where it ends; Julia Child, Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton, the Dalai Lama, music critic Greil Marcus all appear in
the book. There’s also an audio
tribute by the Kitchen Sisters. The downside to all this is that it can also come
across like an insular, over-the-top self-canonization of an institution that is already seen as an emblem of inaccessibility.

For fans of the
restaurant and the lifestyle component of Waters’ work, the book functions like a collector’s item. But 40 Years of Chez Panisse will
remind those engaged in the food movement just how quickly Waters’ lifestyle
brand can eclipse the very real and necessary work
that she’s done to change our food system.

Waters and the world she represents tend to polarize people who really care
about food. In direct and indirect ways, we are told that we’re supposed to
either make pilgrimages to her restaurant (or any one of the dozens that have
been built out of her legacy) or despise her for enjoying her celebrity status
quite so much. To be honest, many of us have probably done both—the point is
that she can inadvertently cause us to take sides.

In a
preface to a recent interview with Waters and the People’s Grocery’s Nikki Henderson on Mother Jones, Tom Philpott warned:
“If the food movement
becomes dominated by its white-tablecloth faction, it risks devolving into a
high-end tasting club that has little impact on the broader culture.”

I see this polarization and the conversation it
propels us to have as entirely worth our time. I’ve thought quite a bit about
these two “factions”—those driven by their interest in cooking and eating,
and those who see food as a compelling, immediate example of what needs fixing
about today’s world—from a political, environmental, and justice-oriented
standpoint. But thankfully, I’m noticing that it’s becoming more and more
difficult to tell where people fall on this spectrum. Mark Bittman is one of my
favorite examples:
He went from teaching people how to cook everything to writing a fiercely political weekly column
on things like irradiation, CAFOs, and the pitfalls of corporate
self-regulation. Michael Pollan, meanwhile, has been reminding us of the
pleasures of eating and cooking.

Waters believes that both matter; she insists we can deconstruct our cake and
eat it, too. And, if you live in a major metropolitan area, its unlikely that
you are more than two degrees from the impressive diaspora of chefs, cookbook
authors, and restaurateurs who spent at least some period of time cooking at
Chez Panisse. It’s also likely that you may have been impacted by the
Edible Schoolyard, her work with the Yale Sustainable Food Project,
the Rome
Sustainable Food Project, or within the larger Slow Food movement.

As the restaurant enters its fifth decade,
Waters is clearly
considering
her legacy. “I can’t imagine celebrating [another decade],” she told
Amanda Gold in the SF Chronicle earlier this week.
“Forty years is a passage of time and really the end of a generation.”

As she starts to think about passing the torch, maybe
that’s why she’s stepped up the serious side of her life’s work. One good
example is Edible Education 101, the class that Waters
has arranged to have Michael Pollan teach this fall at UC Berkeley. Not only
did she invite People’s Grocery director and food justice advocate Nikki
Henderson to co-design the class, but the curriculum includes a
tough-minded group of speakers, including the straight-shooting
nutritionist Marion Nestle, Diet for a Small Planet author Frances
Moore Lappé, Stuffed and Starved author Raj Patel, and Fast Food
Nation author Eric Schlosser.

Waters’ critics have long cast the Edible Schoolyard as a phenomenon that could
only take place in Berkeley*. This week, Waters might be building a platform
from which to prove those critics wrong: Along with rebranding the Chez Panisse
Foundation as the Edible Schoolyard Project, Waters and her
staff are raising what promises to be an impressive sum in order to fund edible
education work on a national level. (The organization will host an array of celebrity
chef dinners this weekend with prices ranging from $250 to $1,000 a ticket, and
a series of grassroots meals in nearly 80 different locations around the
country called Eating for Education).  

Waters’ more political audience members can
undoubtedly get behind both these efforts. But I’m equally struck by another, more
straightforward testament to Waters’ influence on the food
system: her abiding, unflinching support of small farmers and food
producers. 

A few months back, I had the pleasure of
visiting Sunny Slope Orchard, a tiny “micro-farm” in Vacaville,
Calif., that sells a great deal of their fruit to Chez Panisse. We were
there on a rescue mission, after a late-season rain all but destroyed the
second half of their precious Blenheim apricot crop.   

Farmer Bill Spurlock and his wife Fern Henry (a couple who epitomize the Slow
Food ethos with their lovingly precise organic methods and land stewardship) guided my small group around the property. They
offered us samples of their incredibly sweet figs, apricots, and plums and told us about their
soil and water management techniques. At one point, when we approached a plum
tree with an especially unique history, I asked: “Do you tell that story
when you market these plums?” My question was met with blank stares, until
Bill reminded me, “Chez Panisse buys our fruit. We don’t need to market it
at all.”

* There are currently
five other schools with gardens co-branded with the Edible Schoolyard name, but none have received funding from the Chez Panisse Foundation so far.

Related Links:

Will the real food movement please stand up?

Introducing … the Vegan/Omnivore Alliance against Animal Factories

Radiation-tainted milk in Japan, Pollan on food movement elitism, and more

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