Flash back a year and one of the positive aspects of life during a pandemic was an international lock-down culinary revival. Here in the United States, where an estimated 95% of its people regularly consume fast food, the art of cooking and cooking seasonally, let alone slow food concept was suddenly and massively in vogue. And it lasted for months.
Shopping for flour and yeast and coming home empty handed was like living in a revolution era — scoring said ingredients was a triumph of the week and how many loaves of bread, cookies, cakes, scones, quiches, soups and stews were served up at tables filled with family members for weeks on end? The mind boggles. That part was wonderful.
What I hoped, as an ardent home cook, food writer and proponent of the shared family meal was that folk would get a taste for the good life of simple, locally sourced meal ingredients and stick with it more frequently after everything opened up again.
It's no problem to find a bag of flour or packet of yeast now, so needless to say, the rush to stock our pantries has subsided significantly. And while I'm all for supporting our local restaurants, be it dine in or eat out or take home, it would be better for us and the planet if we no longer frequent the non-chain fast food eateries that have nothing to do with nurturing or nourishing us or the earth.
I was excited to learn that Alice Waters was releasing a new book We Are What We Eat — A Slow Food Manifesto. And I signed up through local indie bookstore Point Reyes Books for a copy that included an invitation to hear Alice, chef and founder of Berkeley's Chez Panisse in conversation with another Bay Area legend, The Omnivore's Dilemma author Michael Pollan, Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and the director of the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism.
If you haven't heard of Alice Waters it's most likely that you're not in the United States. Alice has won numerous awards including the National Humanities Medal, the Cavaliere of the Italian Republic, the French Legion of Honor Medal and three James Beard Awards. She is vice president of Slow Food International and founder of the Edible Schoolyard Project, bringing healthy food awareness to communities all around the world.
Back when Alice opened her restaurant Chez Panisse in the early 70s, her goal was to feed people good food in a time of political turmoil. Nothing much has changed fifty years on when we look at life today. And Chez Panisse, like so many restaurants worldwide continues to prove its mettle having hung in there through the past fifteen months.
I've eaten at Chez Panisse only two or three times in the years that I've lived in the Bay Area. My oldest son studied at CAL and I fondly remember a lunch we enjoyed together in the cafe upstairs from the main restaurant. If I lived in Berkeley I would eat there as often as I was able. Like the best of food and wine, the menu is seasonal, the ingredients fresh, delicious and local. In fact, most of the items on the menu when I last ate there were from Sonoma County, where I live and shop the farm stores, so lunch at Chez Panisse is like coming home, only better! Restaurants across the country have modeled themselves on the core values of Chez Panisse and how thankful are we for that?
Alice talks frequently of Bob Cannard, the iconic Sonoma County farmer behind my favorite Green String Farm, whose produce sold her on fresh, seasonal and local in the first place. I spoke with Bob a couple of years ago for a story on farmstands for the Petaluma Visitors Guide and have written about his long history in biodiverse farming. I feel so fortunate to call this bountiful region home.
Over five decades, Alice and her partners deduced that many of the world's most serious problems are, at their core, connected to food. In We Are What We Eat,
the author and activist urges us to take up the mantle of the slow food culture if we haven't already. It is the philosophy that has guided her life's work as she came to see that it is the phenomenon of fast food culture, that prioritizes cheapness, availability and speed that is not just ruining our health, but dehumanizing the ways we live and relate to one another while poisoning the environment.
Michael Pollan was the perfect choice for this online conversation to introduce the book. Michael lives and lectures in Berkeley and is a Chez Panisse regular during more normal times. He and Alice go back a couple of decades in the call to slow food living, championing a different kind of culture, one with values of biodiversity, regenerative farming, seasonality, stewardship and pleasure in work.
"We Are What We Eat" is a wonderful, beautiful, elegant piece of work — a manifesto that is so clarifying, simple and with a sense of inevitability," said Michael, as he introduced this important new book.
It's about a whole lot more than food, the positives and negatives of the way that we eat and how we live our lives. It's an illuminating read even for the committed farm-to-table reader.
The book talks about why we are buying so much fast food and why we believe we need access to convenience food 24/7, why it's okay to eat in our cars, why its okay to expect supersize portions, with much of it going to waste.
Alice spoke about growing up in New Jersey after the second world war. Her family ate seasonally. She remembers playing outside until it was dark, the taste of a New Jersey tomato and of a summer strawberry. When, in the 1950s, convenience food came into play and along with it, mass advertising, Americans became immediately addicted to it and to the salt and sugar that came with it.
"We lost our seasons and we lost the camaraderie of the table," she said. Other countries held on to their food cultures for longer, whereas America, built on puritan values, never put much stock into fun and flavor at the table. It was always more about growing and producing food for quality.
Both Alice and Michael laud Italy for "Still fighting the good fight when it comes to food values." This made me smile, as my husband of over three decades, Timo, was born into and raised by Italian immigrant parents in the UK and even after we moved to California he can honestly say he has only ever eaten fast food in a car once in his life and that was when an unsuspecting friend stopped in at one on a road trip. He likes to remind anyone who will listen that there's nothing too important to get in the way of sitting at a table for a bite to eat.
According to Alice: "The fast food culture destroyed the family dinner."
The two of them discussed how culinary skills have been lost and many people don't believe they have time to cook. They aspire to but don't find their way to it.
"I'm always trying to win people over with taste," said Alice. "I want to give them this, I don't just want to tell them what to do. If you know some very, very basic things about cooking and buying food it can be easy and important."
Alice is determined to demonstrate to the government that organic and local food can be purchased for school lunches for the same cost or less than mass produced foods. She's devoted the past 20 years to working in schools on the Edible Garden Project. My own three sons went to Valley Vista Elementary School in Petaluma and were fortunate to have school garden classes run by an excellent garden teacher and parent volunteers throughout their early years. It's not this way everywhere but it should be.
"Nature is such a compelling teacher," said Alice, a former Montessori teacher herself. She talked of a world that is sensorily deprived, whereas:"Food touches all of the senses."
"Kids don't all know that chicken nuggets come from a bird," added Michael, agreeing that we should teach stewardship of the earth in our gardens from kindergarten on up.
Both spoke of the shocking degree of food shipped out of state in the mid west to feed other states by powerful industries. "This is an emergency," warned Alice, calling for regenerative agriculture and biodiversity of crops to become more widespread, immediately both to repair our immune systems and pull the carbon back down into the parched earth.
The Central Valley for instance, would benefit vastly from a layer of compost on dry, barren, drought-hit land. It wouldn't need nearly as much water to grow crops.
A big take out was that we must treat kids as adults with regards to food, respect them and ask them to help, empower them. "That's what food communicates," expressed Alice. "Love. It's terribly important at this moment in time.
We have the power to chose what we eat. And we have the potential for individual and global transformation by shifting our relationship to food. "All it takes is a taste," says Alice.
I'm about half way through reading the book as I write this post. It's short and succinct and powerful. Highly recommend.
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