apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

Great video- I think she has many great points about children needing to learn how to cook, about supporting local products, but... perhaps for the rest of us, we need to begin with baby steps. She's right on about our daily decisions- I know people who wouldn't dare spend the time or money on this, but I prefer to spend money on fresh food rather than expensive clothes!

Yes and no.

She offers us the model but we have to adapt it to our own reality.

California has a growing season that practically spans an entire year. Other parts of the country, like the Midwest have shorter growing seasons.

But, everyone can adopt the philosophy of her model and adapt it to our reality. I actually put quite a bit of thought into this and write about it here:

http://thepleasanthouse.com/2009/03/18/good-food-its-out-there-you-just-need-to-know-what-to-do-with-it/

Alice Waters didn't set out to change the world. She cooked what made sense to her and just wanted to make tasty food. As she grew, she began to realize that what makes sense to her shouldn't be an elitist philosophy. Rather, everyone should have access to good, natural food. She's on the right track in my opinion. We have the tools and the teachers...

It was an amazing interview, and Alice Waters is an inspiration, but she really lost me with that egg in the fire bit.
I kept thinking, who wants to bring in wood, stack it, and light a fire before breakfast? The occasional dinner? sure, but really, that's a bit much...
Plus, health wise, regularly cooking over an open flame is not very good for you because of all of the emissions that can damage your lungs. For someone pushing slow food for health reasons, that's a bit of an oversight.

It's utopian messianistic elitist blathering. The prescriptivist in her is immoral, illiberal, and misanthropic.

You can support good food without demanding that we all eat seasonally or locally - most of the country simply cannot survive with that kind of a diet (never mind organic), and few of those who could survive would enjoy it. Too much of the food movement, like the environmental movement, is irreducibly genocidal - 90% of the country and the world would have to die to live according to their ideals. Then there's her whole anti-rational fear of modernity and Rousseauian fetishization of the "natural".

Jamie, Nigella, Martha, Ina Garten all espouse realistic ways of cooking better. Make the best choices you can of what's available, rather Waters' penchant for fatwas. You have to be pretty far out to make Martha look like a reasonable, convenient alternative, but the single egg fryer stuck in kitchen's open hearth, after a discussion of only buying from farmer's markets for freshly picked produce demonstrates how insane she is.

I was disappointed with this segment. Alice Waters is a genius, but in this segment she came off as an elitist with no understand of how today's home cooks work.

This was wide-reaching opportunity for Waters to teach Americans how to eat better. I wish she would have suggested incremental changes we all can make with a relatively small amount of effort, similar to what Mark Bittman shares in Food Matters.

Instead, she disses the microwave and makes eggs for two in her kitchen's hearth. This makes her seem out of touch, nearly crazy. Lame PR move and a missed opportunity, in my opinion.

@preppycuisine- Well put!

@gochrisgo- Alice Waters is utterly out of touch with any form of normalcy that she probably really thinks that we should all build fires in our kitchens to cook our breakfast (air quality be damned).

While I believe she originally started out with sincere intentions, at this point it seems she prefers to play role of anointed guru and has basically become an extreme stereotype for the foodie movement.

I heard about a talk in SF with a panel of food "experts" in which she, Michael Pollen (who by the way is quickly heading down the same path as Waters), and a few others spoke about slow food etc. Waters was asked if she ever finds herself in a situation where she has to compromise her values and just grab a something *gasp* from a grocery store rather then from a farmer's market. Her response was an emphatic "Never!, I do all my grocery shopping at Chez Panisse."

I must have missed something. I remember her chopping tomatoes and herbs and serving them over grilled bread with an egg. Sounds pretty utilitarian to me.

The fireplace in the kitchen is an over the top luxury for most people, as well as Tuscan olive oil. Chez Panisse is not a greasy spoon, she does have a moneyed and sophisticated audience to market to and television is a good way of doing that. Perhaps people's perceptions about her and her mission would be different if she were not a successful and wealthy business person?

i agree she is completely out of touch with reality.

This segment made me mad, for the reasons everyone said, she is out of touch with reality.

She wants every child to grow a garden in school. That would be such a waste here. Plant the garden in May, neglect it until September, and come back to a dead garden. Dumb.

If we only ate what was grown near the only fresh foods we would eat in the winter are meat, dairy and a couple root veggies.

Ms. Waters, please come to Minnesota and open up a restaurant. Let's see how well it goes for you.

She's out of touch, but not completely wrong. I agree with the sentiment that you have to adjust this to your reality. Same with Michael Pollan...it's all well and good to espouse these things, but I don't live in Berkeley.

Most people probably don't live like their yoga gurus, lamas, priests, professors or community activists. Some of them may seem a little "out there" even. But we still listen to them because we think they're on to something. I think she's been on to something for awhile. What Alice Waters started as a place to cook for her friends has turned into the philosophy that drives some of the best restaurants in your city--not just in Northern California.

@ art: it was the "I only get things from the farmer's market so that they have been freshly picked". You can only live like that in a very small handful of areas around the globe (and even in California it's only possible thanks to a number of huge public works projects). Too much colder and you're stuck with potatoes for 6-9 months of the year, too much warmer and hardly anything grows (see Vegas, Las).

I have no problem with Chez Panisse not feeding the proletariat, my name should be rather self explanatory on that part. It's just the sheer impossibility of this life for such a vast percentage of the population irrespective of income. Ken Griffin (billionaire hedge fun manager in Chicago) isn't getting any spring vegetables from a farmer's market for a few months, while even the poorest people in San Fran can get fresh local produce all year.

Again she was frying eggs in single fryers. The whole open hearth in the kitchen is an awesome touch, and something that I'd like to do, it's just the sheer impracticality of cooking one egg at a time.

The WSJ had a great video at Georges Vongeritchen's country house. He's got a fireplace where he grills some food, and discussed what he does for gathering of friends on the weekends. He obviously has more resources than the average home cook (26 restaurants around the world...) but he lives in Manhattan and Westchester and deals with real world conditions. He mentioned that he wanted to cut back a bit on number of guests or what he did for them because it was getting to be a bit of a time sink in the mornings. So he's still tethered to the same reality as the rest of us and understands the limitations we all face. Waters needs us to violate scientific laws, and in MY house we obey the Laws of Thermodynamics if nothing else!

Alice's lifestyle is wonderful, but she is able to live that way because she is wealthy. I agree the interview was a missed opportunity to relate her message and ideas to average everyday families. Or perhaps her messaging needs some rewriting. Time to find a new Public Relations manager.

The problem with the slow food movement starts with the name itself. It sounds snooty. If Alice wants to start a food revolution, she needs to get people excited about growing their own food and supporting local growers...even those that are not certified organic growers. In my opinion, "organic" is becoming a clever marketing tool being used by an increasingly large group in the Ag business who wish to piggy back on the successes of smaller niche growers. I would buy "local" over "organic" in a heartbeat.

Alice Waters means well, but she's spent too many decades in the bubble of the Bay Area. What I'd really like to see her do is go to the Midwest for a month and explore the ways a working-class family that's short on funds and long on work hours can improve its diet. Now that would be helpful.

Many good points.

Everyone can learn to eat good fresh and even seasonal food no matter what region of this country or any other country they may live. This is the way Western civilization has lived for hundreds of years. Ancient cultures continue to live like this today. At first, I was surprised to be foraging garlic mustard in downtown Chicago--then I looked around, gauged the wind and realized that their seeds were probably blown a couple of blocks from a Chinatown back yard.

We have images of the poor and disenfranchised living on canned and frozen vegetables. There is no doubt that the terms canned and frozen have taken on new meaning in modern society. Canning used to be something people did at home with jars and fresh produce. Do we have time to can our own vegetables for the winter time in modern society? The fact is, these thoughts used to be everyday thoughts of everyday families.