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Alice Waters: The delicious revolutionary

Alice Waters, the Californian who pioneered the politics of food, is on her way to Oz.

Joanna Savill

Trailblazer: Alice Waters is on her way to Australia.
Trailblazer: Alice Waters is on her way to Australia.Supplied

Alice Waters is an unlikely revolutionary. But then, her revolution was born in a gentler time. It was the era of protests against the Vietnam War and racial segregation. But it was also the era of peace and love, of community and communes. It was the 1960s – when the youth of America learned about the power of gathering.

The power of gathering found a natural home in a little restaurant and cafe in the university town of Berkeley, California. Opened in 1971, it was named Chez Panisse, after a favourite character in a French cinema classic. Chez Panisse focused on simple cooking, seasonality, good ingredients and connections with the people who grew them. Although inspired by travels and eating in France, its style had nothing to do with stiff Michelin-esque fine dining. Eating here was casual, communal and inclusive.

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Rockpool's Neil Perry is a long-time fan, saying he's eaten at Chez Panisse at least a dozen times. "Whether it's a simple goat's cheese salad, a piece of sole or salmon when the West Coast salmon is running, it's always really wonderful," he says. "It's plain to see that it's all about seasonality, the quality of the ingredients and the craft of cooking, hiding nothing behind that quality."

If all that sounds wildly contemporary, it's because the restaurant's founder, Alice Waters, had a head start on many of us. She understood the power of gathering friends and diners around a restaurant table but also linking in chefs and farmers.

"She was ahead of her time", says Danielle Alvarez, a former Chez Panisse chef now working in Sydney. "It was always about, 'How do we help the farmers, what can we buy from them?' Those conversations can change things on a daily basis. There is no calling up and ordering from a generic place. If a farmer doesn't have carrots you don't get carrots."

It was long before most chefs, and food writers, used the term "farm to table" or professed serious affiliations with growers and producers, let alone championed organics and sustainable agriculture. If anyone truly deserves the all-time title of paddock-to-plate poster girl, it's this fine-featured, sweetly steely 70 year old turned serious food activist.

"She has lived the collaboration dream that is really quite extraordinary," says Perry. "And she gets everybody to believe it. It's a lesson in the difference between talking the talk and walking the walk – to see what true integrity is."

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Shocked by what she saw beyond the Berkeley bubble, Waters then began challenging contemporary food systems and consumption. That was in the 1990s, when she issued her famous manifesto on the ethics of eating.

"The way people are living their lives, how unhappy they are, destroying the land, the obesity epidemic …" says Waters, "The fast-food culture permeates every aspect of life. People see everything as fast, cheap and easy. And they want everything fast, cheap and easy. We have become what we eat and we will pay for it."

Through her powerful networks, people began to listen. "She's a big-time force," says Alvarez. "In chef culture, chef life, there isn't such a drive to be part of that conversation [about change]. But she's always been the driver of that conversation. She speaks to politicians, Nobel Prize-winning authors, Michelle Obama! And she creates conversations around how food affects everything and how change can come."

These days, though, Alice Waters would prefer to call herself an educator. "I'm definitely an activist," she says, "but I'm not trying to overthrow anything. I'm trying to win people over. And that is an educational process."

And education begins at school. The Edible Schoolyard project was founded in the mid-1990s to transform unused space at a Berkeley public school into a food garden. The concept has spread to dozens of schools, integrating the planting, growing and cooking of food across the curriculum – not dissimilar to Stephanie Alexander's Kitchen Garden Project here in Australia.

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The next stage is a truly ambitious dream: free school lunch. And not just for American kids (the concept has been adopted in California), but for every child on the planet. "It's the most beautiful way to deal with all the issues – health, the environment, poverty, hunger," Waters says. "We have to go deeply into the schools and really bring children into a new relationship with food and nature when they are young. And how better than through a delicious sustainable school lunch and engaging them that way?"

Architect of her own "delicious revolution", Waters also wants to recruit all those with influence in today's food world. "Everyone who has an awareness and celebrity should use it to the greatest advantage of all of us. We are in a very precarious position. I would love to go back to the kitchen and cook but I am so worried about the future. I can't be an island. I can't just keep Chez Panisse and all our farmers and life in Berkeley when what's happening around the world is totally affecting that ideal."

"She's an inspiration, and true culinary royalty" says Neil Perry who is delighted Waters is finally making it to Australia.

An ethical eating manifesto

If you choose to eat mass-produced fast food, you are supporting a network of supply and demand that is destroying local communities and traditional ways of life all over the world – a system that replaces self-sufficiency with dependence. And you are supporting a method of agriculture that is ecologically unsound – that depletes the soil and leaves harmful chemical residues in our food.

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But if you decide to eat fresh food in season – and only in season – that is locally grown by farmers who take care of the earth, then you are contributing to the health and stability of local agriculture and local communities.

From The Ethics of Eating: an address by Alice Waters, May 22, 1994

Alice Waters is in Australia from November 12-17. She will speak at Sydney Opera House on November 12. See sydneyoperahouse.com. She will speak at The Athenaeum on November 17, in partnership with the Wheeler Centre. See wheelercentre.com.

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