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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Alice Waters - Food Fighter
  • Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2004 08:47:50 -0700


March 7, 2004
NY Times Sunday Magazine

Food Fighter
By PEGGY ORENSTEIN

t started with a peach. Not just any peach but a Frog Hollow Farm peach,
coaxed into its fullness by the rich loam of the Sacramento River Delta. A
golden
peach suffused with a lover's blush, a hint of erotic give at the cleft, its
juice sliding down the chin at the gentlest pressure -- it was a peach that
tastes the way peaches once did, the way they should. It was the peach with
which
Alice Waters, the founder of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, the chef who
revolutionized American fine dining, imagined she would transform children's
lives.
It was Frog Hollow peaches, which can sell for about $5 a pound, that Waters
took seven years ago to the first day of summer session at Martin Luther King
Jr. Middle School in Berkeley. She was carving an organic garden out of a
parking lot next to the playground, planting the seeds for a schoolwide
program to
promote ecological and gastronomic literacy. One bite of these peaches, she
thought, and the scales placed on students' eyes by the false prophets of the
junk-food industry would fall away. They would see the folly of their Devil
Dog
ways and convert to the gospel of lush produce. Like Genesis inverted, the
fruit of knowledge would lead them back to the garden of innocence. It didn't
quite work out that way. ''They wouldn't touch the peaches,'' Waters recalled.
''They said they were furry.''
That was in 1997, and although Waters, a former Montessori teacher who
advocates experiential learning, has been subject to a few lessons herself,
her near
religious sense of mission is undiminished. These days the student-tended
garden is a stunning acre. She has also built a cooking classroom at the
school,
whose students are largely middle- and low-income children of color, with
storage cabinets of handmade, recycled materials and compost bins nestling on
indigo linoleum. Waters is raising the $400,000 annual budget for these two
projects, collectively known as the Edible Schoolyard, through nonprofit
organizations, including the Chez Panisse Foundation.
Last month she upped the ante, presenting a districtwide proposal to the
school board that, she says, will ''transform education through the
school-lunch
curriculum.'' The first step will be a multimillion-dollar 15,000 square-foot
dining commons at King. Furnished using renewable materials and serving
breakfast, lunch and a snack made from local organic ingredients, it will
serve as a
model for how she believes the nation, and not just its elite, should eat.
(Last year she also started a garden-to-table project at the coincidentally
named
Berkeley College at Yale, involving the kinds of students who would be more
likely than the middle schoolers -- who actually reside in Berkeley -- to
become patrons of Chez Panisse.) Her dream is to spread her ideas across the
country, as she did with her new American cooking in the 1980's, but this time
transcending class and age. By re-engineering schoolchildren's taste buds,
Waters
says, she can reform America's relationship to food -- to what we eat, how we
eat, where it comes from and how it ought to taste.
Waters has always been as much activist as restaurateur. Her passion for
simply prepared food using the freshest ingredients first blossomed in the
French
markets she wandered as a student in Paris, then marinated in the
counterculture of 1960's Berkeley. A result was a melding of politics and
pleasure. She
considers food a vehicle -- the vehicle -- for social change. Rather than
parlaying her celebrity into a TV show, a chain of restaurants or a
frozen-food
line, she has used it to preach conscious consumption, her ultimate recipe for
overcoming postmodern alienation and overstuffed lives. She says that if
Americans would choose seasonal, organic food grown through sustainable
techniques by
local farmers, if we would serve caring meals at the family table rather than
scarfing Happy Meals in the minivan, we would restore family values, transform
our communities and stabilize the environment. We would also enjoy ourselves
more. ''There's so much pressure to continue the way we're going,'' she says,
''and no enlightened direction to go the other way. You have to begin
someplace.'' She gestures around the middle-school kitchen. ''And I think
it's with
children. It's right here.''
ne afternoon while waiting to meet Waters, I sized up her competition: the
Snack Shack, a dilapidated outdoor stand, is the only place King's 900
students
can currently buy lunch. The fare is pizza, hamburgers, hot dogs and nachos --
though calling these greasy items prepared elsewhere, wrapped like airline
food, frozen and reheated by those names is an insult to junk food.
As students from King whirled around, flirting, playing basketball, lolling
on the grass, I asked a few of them what they had eaten the previous day. A
sixth-grade girl could recall only that she had two doughnuts for breakfast
and
half a sandwich and candy for lunch. An eighth-grade girl skipped breakfast
and
lunch altogether and had a Coke after school, followed by a sandwich for
dinner. The boys ate more consistently, but the nutritional content was not
much
better: breakfast was Frosted Flakes or hash browns from McDonald's. Burgers
or
pizza for lunch. Lots of chicken for dinner. Vegetables beyond carrots or
corn were scarce, unless ketchup counts. The closest thing to fruit for many
was
a bag of Skittles candy. Only two children had eaten balanced meals within 24
hours. This in a town renowned as a foodie's mecca. Nationally, a third of
children eat fast food for at least one meal a day.
Weaning children from their three basic food groups -- fat, sugar and salt --
won't be easy. The statistics on childhood obesity have been repeated so
often that they risk becoming mere background noise. According to the Centers
for
Disease Control, one in six children ages 6 to 19 are overweight -- even more
among African-American and Latino teenagers. Among other things, overweight
kids are at greater risk of developing asthma, diabetes and high blood
pressure.
Fast food, a sedentary lifestyle and the decrease in the number of schools
offering physical education classes fuel the trend, but the 29 million
students
who sit down to school lunches daily also encounter meals riddled with fat.
That's partly because the National School Lunch Program's mandate is also to
provide a market for surplus agricultural commodities, particularly beef and
dairy products.
To Waters, the obesity epidemic is a symptom of a deeper issue: how fast food
and industrial agriculture are destroying the environment and our culture.
''We're losing the values we learned from our parents when we sat around our
family table, when we lived closer to the land and communicated,'' she says.
''The way children are eating now is teaching them about disposability, about
sameness, about fast, cheap and easy. They learn that work is to be avoided,
that
preparation is drudgery.''
Waters describes a seductive world, one that tugs at nostalgia for the past.
Who would disagree with the importance of the family table? Who really prefers
to eat at Taco Bell? But for single parents, or those in hectic two-income
homes or any mom or dad balancing the swirl of children's scheduled
activities,
Waters's vision might inspire as much guilt as longing. Waters, who is
divorced and stopped cooking at Chez Panisse 19 years ago after the birth of
her
daughter (now a Yale student and the impetus for the project there),
acknowledges
as much. ''It's hard to keep the nuclear-family table together,'' she told me.
''But it meant even more to me as a single mom. I brought in a whole lot of
friends to come and eat with us.''
Given the crisis in children's diets, particularly those of poor children,
some also question the wisdom of Waters's emphasis on local and organic
ingredients. ''We should beware of economic elitism,'' warns Adam Drewnowski,
director
of the nutritional sciences program at the University of Washington in
Seattle. ''Going to an inner-city school and telling kids to eat organic is
trying
to project a middle-class lifestyle without giving people extra money to
attain
it.''
Alice Waters doesn't want to hear from naysayers, nor does she want to dwell
on the question of how a district that is laying off teachers can rationalize
gourmet meals, even if private financing foots much of the bill. ''I refuse to
operate in a paradigm of scarcity,'' she says. She admits that raising the
nutritional level of school food would be useful but insists it's not enough.
''There's a health emergency and a planetary emergency,'' she says. ''We have
to
be aware of whom we're buying our food from and how it's produced. You can't
just take the vending machines out of the cafeterias and think that solves the
problem.''
Ultimately, Waters says, if you focus solely on health, you'll never change
kids' eating habits: you must start with pleasure. ''Kids need to find these
foods to be delicious so they fall in love with them, and it changes their
lives
forever.'' Freshly picked produce is tastier than that which has lingered in
cold storage. And that, she maintains, may inspire a kid to choose an apple
over a Snapple.
Waters has learned a thing or two since the Frog Hollow peach debacle. These
days at the Edible Schoolyard, the first lesson for incoming sixth graders is
picking and roasting an ear of corn from the garden. For many it's the first
time they've tasted the fresh, and certainly the fresh-picked, version of
their
favorite vacuum-packed vegetable. While tilling the garden, they're
encouraged to graze the Cape gooseberry patch or snack from the esplanades of
fruit
trees. Slowly, carefully and always emphasizing participation in cultivation
and
preparation, students are enticed to try the more ewww-producing stuff:
asparagus, kale, fava beans.
''These kids remind me of my daughter when she was about 4,'' Waters says.
''They don't like to try what's unfamiliar. They don't want their food mixed
together. Those are big psychological barriers. If they haven't put time into
the
garden and in the preparation and sitting around the table, it's 50-50
whether they'll eat something even if it looks good.''

Waters envisions the dining commons as a similar act of seduction. Entering
the ''beautiful, convivial, anti-institutional room,'' the children will look
through an open kitchen to a wood-burning pizza oven. They'll be involved in
setting the tables with cloth and real cutlery. The proposed menus themselves
read little differently from those of a traditional school lunch. There is
oven-fried chicken, sausage-and-pepper pizza, beef tacos. The difference is
in the
preparation and ingredients, the freshness of the accompanying salads and
fruit. ''I'm not trying to pull out the hot dog,'' Waters explains. ''Maybe we
have a hot dog, but it's made with great pork and tastes great and the roll is
right and we're buying this from the right people.''
Waters is not the first to dream of matchmaking struggling farmers with local
schools. Farm-to-school programs have been gaining ground among health
advocates, environmentalists and the Department of Agriculture for nearly a
decade.
There are now programs, though more limited than the one Waters envisions, in
400 school districts in 22 states. Considering that a school the size of King
can consume 250 pounds of potatoes for one meal, such partnerships could
guarantee security for local farmers, change planting patterns, stop urban
sprawl
and potentially lower prices.
But how, precisely, would such a system work? One sticking point, according
to Robert Gottlieb, professor of urban and environmental policy at Occidental
College in Los Angeles, is the logistics of purchasing and distribution. The
L.A. school district, for instance, decided a program in which farmers'
markets
supplied produce for in-school salad bars presented too many variables, among
them inconsistent supplies and having to coordinate with different farmers.
Instead it opted to go with its established wholesale system. Another
difficulty
is that Waters's locally grown, organic meals may end up costing about $5
compared with the current $3 for a typical school lunch. Waters would like to
institute a sliding scale, with more affluent parents subsidizing others;
she'll
also encourage community members to sponsor individual children. That might
work in food-obsessed liberal-hearted Berkeley, but larger-scale success would
demand radical change at the federal level. Marsha Guerrero, the Edible
Schoolyard program coordinator and Waters's lieutenant for the dining
commons, argues
that's possible. ''When we understood how many kids were smoking, we launched
national antismoking campaigns and drug-education programs in schools,''
Guerrero says. ''This issue is at least as serious as those are.''

One morning last year, I wandered through the Edible Schoolyard garden
reading the student-painted signs for roses, spearmint, grapes, strawberries,
fig
trees, onions, poppies. The sixth and seventh graders spend 10 weekly
90-minute
sessions here as part of their science curriculum and an equal amount of time
in the kitchen with their humanities classes. The eighth graders visit each
venue about six times a year.
Kelsey Siegel, who works as garden manager, listed the tasks of the day: the
students could choose to help build a bench using a sustainable cement mixture
of clay and straw. Or they could plant mustard greens or radish seedlings. Or
weed the garlic. As a special treat, they also got to make pizza in an
outdoor wood-burning stone oven, built by a friend of Waters's.
Within a few minutes, the students had scattered. By the pizza oven one group
rolled out a cornmeal crust, brushed it with a layer of garlic-infused olive
oil and sprinkled the top with feta cheese, spring onions, chard, rosemary and
mint. ''This cheese smells like feet!'' announced a compact boy in a red
fleece pullover. Then, realizing he'd been impolitic, he added, ''I guess
it's a
good way to eat if you want to be organic and vegetarian.''
As I walked back to the kitchen, I bumped into Waters and Guerrero. ''What
did they think of the pizza?'' Waters asked expectantly. Before I could reply,
Guerrero, the voice of pragmatism, jumped in. ''They hated the cheese, didn't
they?'' Waters furrowed her brow a moment, then brightened. ''If the kids
think
feta is weird, why not have them make their own fresh mozzarella? It's the
easiest thing in the world.''
The kids may still prefer Domino's, but Waters is onto something: teaching
about new foods, emphasizing participation and offering choices are all
critical
to nudging children toward better diets. A Cornell University study found
that elementary-school students who were educated about healthier options
introduced in the cafeteria were significantly more likely to sample the new
items,
and a U.C.L.A. study found that adding a salad bar to the cafeteria, which
allows kids to choose their own fruits and vegetables, increased produce
consumption at lunch 40 percent among low-income kids.
Researchers from Children's Hospital in Oakland recently endorsed Waters's
plan as a defense against obesity and diabetes. Meanwhile, preliminary results
of a three-year study on the Edible Schoolyard curriculum by Michael Murphy,
associate professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, are intriguing:
after one year, students at King, compared with a control group at a similar
middle school, showed improved behavior and fewer emotional problems. They
were
savvier about ecology, and their overall grade point averages improved.
''What this research shows about vegetable eating,'' Murphy continues, ''is
that you probably ought to put kids in a garden but also teach them about
gardens and cook the food from the garden and have them taste it and see it's
delicious. And then do it repeatedly. That's why a dining commons would be
effective. Eating a cucumber one time isn't enough.''

That night, Waters invited me to dinner in the upstairs cafe at Chez Panisse.
We slid into a simple wooden booth. Waters recalled that when she started the
restaurant, which had one floor then, people told her she was crazy. The
tables were too close together, they said, the atmosphere too casual. Finding
a
reliable network of local farmers who used sustainable methods was
inconceivable. And serving just one prix fixe option for dinner? Absurd.
But that's the thing about Alice Waters: practicality is not her starting
point. She is a romantic, believing in her vision even when it seems
unreasonable, going about making it happen and waiting for everyone else to
catch up.
Perhaps her plan for America's schools will indeed be like her fine dining
revolution, with its mixed lettuces and sumptuous peaches: years from now
we'll look
back on today's lunchtime offerings, which seem so inevitable, and see them
for the soggy iceberg lettuce and canned string beans they are.
Our waitress set down the entree Waters ordered for us: salmon (wild from
Oregon) with spinach (from nearby Terra Firma Farm), spring onions (in season
for
a few fleeting weeks), chervil butter and a sprinkling of young peas. I
panicked. I hate peas. But since I was dining with one of the world's renowned
chefs, I forced myself to dig in. With the first sweet bite the prejudice I'd
clung to since I was, yes, 4 years old, melted away. Waters, oblivious to my
revelation, continued doing what a visionary does best: she preached about
how to
introduce kids to vegetables in ways that would make them ask for more and
waxed on about starting a chain of tortillerias to finance her projects. And
she
makes you believe, if just for the space of a dinner, that a better world is
possible.




  • [Livingontheland] Alice Waters - Food Fighter, Tradingpost, 03/12/2004

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