Happy Birthday, Alice Waters
an interview with the chef, author, and legend herself
sharing a garden view with Alice Waters in the pavillion at Monticello
As a culinary figure, Alice Waters looms, a mythical giant, over the farm-to-table movement that she created in 1971 with the opening of Chez Panisse. In the years since, she’s promoted a way of thinking about food that’s rooted in the land and the beauty of the ingredients it renders.
As an actual figure, Waters is petite, with lightness to her step. Her voice floats on the breeze. There’s something butterfly-esque in the way the 78-year-old chef and author carries herself, flitting and intricate.
In the autumn of the Beforetimes, I had a chance to sit down with Alice Waters for a long, meandering interview at the Heritage Harvest Festival. The festival is the vision of seed-saver, master gardener, and author Ira Wallace (about whom I had the honor of writing for The Local Palate), and it includes talks and demos on seed saving, gardening, and seasonal cooking surrounded by the gorgeous living backdrop of Monticello.
Though the story I was working never came to fruition (thanks to the publication that hired me pulling the plug on the idea), the time I spent with the legendary Alice Waters is something I’ll always be grateful for, and the image of us sitting together in Jefferson’s garden pavillion, a serene setting for a meditative conversation about Waters’ great loves, food and film.
I’ve never shared the interview until now, but on the occasion of Waters’ 78th birthday, I wanted to give everyone the gift of her words (slightly edited and condensed for clarity).
two legends, legending
SG: I know, through your work with The Edible Schoolyard and through your writing that seed saving is something that’s important to you, and it’s on center stage here at the Heritage Harvest Festival. Why does seed saving matter to you?
AW: It matters to me because of taste. It also matters to me because the biodiversity is critical for the planet. At this moment in time when we are so concerned about climate, we need that biodiversity to save us.
I remember way back when when there was a potato famine in Ireland and if something like that happens and a crop fails, you really need to have another crop right there, a potato that succeeds. And we learn more and more – i feel like I’ve learned something almost every day about biodiversity, and it’s a thrill for me. It’s an aesthetic that interests me, knowing that there are that many colors of beans and I can make a salad with all of those.
Right now we’re seeing that biodiversity really expand in the heritage tomato place and probably because tomatoes are so familiar to us, and all you have to do is slice them and eat them, that they become so popular. There are hundreds of kinds of tomatoes, and every day of tomato season, I can make a different color salad for Chez Panisse. One day it’s yellow, one day it’s green, the next day it’s green and yellow and red. Some days they’re dark brown. It’s an aesthetic and taste thrill for me.
SG: To me, this hearkens back to what you wrote about in your book, Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook, about the pursuit of beauty. Like this is a living embodiment of that.
AW: That’s right, it is. I think we’ve lost a lot of beauty in our everyday lives, and I think food can bring that back and it can bring it back, not only in terms of gathering around the table, but it has an alive-ness to it, and it’s endlessly changing with the seasons, so you’re never ever bored. It fulfills a kind of sense of being excited with your life. It draws you to it, especially when you know exactly what farm it’s from, and you think about that friend. It’s a kind of dimension to your everyday life that brings meaning to it.
SG: What do you see as the role of the chef in acknowledging and sharing these stories of how climate change is affecting the livelihoods of the farmers they work with?
AW: There are a number of young farmers right now that are really consumed by it, people like Finian Makepeace are putting out films about regenerative farming.
This has to come from all sides. We can’t just hear from brave young children. We need to hear from farmers, older farmers who are seeing this change in the ground. This isn’t the burning down of the rainforest. This is an everyday threat to our food system. We need to hear about it from everyone, but it’s very difficult when important people that have the megaphone don’t believe in it. We have to learn about where our food comes from and really think about what we can grow here.
SG: I think it’s fair to say that your cookbooks fall under the category of classics. There’s a timelessness to them that makes them as relevant now as the day they were written. Can you share a bit of your approach to writing cookbooks?
I want to convey a number of messages. One, that it’s not complicated. You can open up the inside cover of the book and see what my messages are. Buy from the people who are taking care of the land for all of us. Eat with your family and friends. Cook simply. Buy food in season. Food can be affordable, but it can never be cheap. When it’s cheap, you aren’t supporting the farmer that takes care of the land for future generations. Know your farmer, and know what you’re looking for and how beautiful it is.
I love the vegetable book because it’s a beautiful book. I want books that say: food is beautiful and farming is beautiful. I also want people to be inspired to compost. I want them to invite their friends over to cook for them. We’ve done this before. It’s only in the last few years that we’ve been told it’s not necessary.
SG: I know that film is a passion of yours, and I was wondering what captivates you about film? I’m curious if you can speak to how food and film are two loves of your life.
Both are very emotional things. Even though film is in that one dimension—I can’t taste it. I can hear it and see it, but when there’s a really great film, you can almost smell it and taste it and touch it. It moves you, and I think of something like Babette’s Feast. That’s a film that’s internationally recognized. Everyone knows Babette’s Feast, and I keep thinking about that film—we need a film made like that again, for this moment in time. I keep thinking of the right film maker. I think of Ang Lee. He did Eat, Drink, Man Woman. The first scene in that is of a chef trying to cook a meal for his daughter, and it is a masterclass in the preparation of his duck.
I’m seeing a lot of films that tell stories of the bad news, definitely Darwin’s Nightmare. Hubert Sauper is able to do that, to touch people in so many ways with his films. But we need that, and I keep talking to film makers at the Telluride Film Festival and saying, please, please, please. We need to hear children’s voices. We need to demystify cooking, we need to prove that the fast food messages are wrong and misleading. The thing about it that’s so great is that it comes so easily to children. They love it. It’s about everything important in our lives.
