The Journal. - Farm-to-Table Pioneer on Why We Still Need Better Food

Episode Date: June 28, 2024

Alice Waters helped the farm-to-table movement go mainstream in the U.S. through her restaurant Chez Panisse. In the decades since she has kept advocating for locally grown, organic food over the fast food Americans regularly consume. Kate Linebaugh sat down with Waters at The Wall Street Journal’s Global Food Forum. To watch a video of the conversation, check out the episode on Spotify. Further Listening: – Could Paris Hilton Create the 'Next Disney?' – Live from Seattle: A Weird Economy + Election Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, it's Kate. This episode was recorded live at the Wall Street Journal Global Food Forum. You can also see it as a video if you listen on Spotify. Enjoy. In the U.S., the farm-to-table movement is basically everywhere. There are nearly 9,000 farmers markets, and locally sourced seasonal menus are offered at restaurants around the country. But it wasn't always this way. One of the pioneers of this movement is Alice Waters, the chef, activist, and writer.

She founded the legendary California restaurant Chez Panisse in the early 1970s. There, she built out a philosophy of using only the freshest locally grown ingredients. To do that, she teamed up with nearby farmers, and she adjusted her menu based on what they were growing. The idea was that this restaurant in Northern California should serve food grown nearby. In the decades since, Alice Waters has worked to turn Americans away from fast food toward a slow food mentality. And now she wants to bring her vision of a revolutionized food system to a larger population. Live from the Wall Street Journal Global Food Forum, this is a special recording of the Journal podcast,

our show about money, business, and power. I'm Kate Leinbaugh. Alice Waters, welcome. Thank you. Next vacation. Ready to kick off? Discover exciting games and events. Plus, find amazing hidden gems in cities full of adventures, delicious food, and diverse cultures. You'll love it so much you'll want to extend your stay beyond the matches. Get the ball rolling on your soccer getaway. Head to visittheusa.com. so in preparing for this i had a conversation with alice and she asked me to bring something from my garden and so here you have it we have a representative from the new world, the black-eyed Susan. And we have some lavender from the old world. Thank you, Alice, for the inspiration. We also have some strawberries.

Because strawberries play an important role in your story. Because at 19, you went to Paris. Tell us about the strawberry you had. Well, I went to Paris when I was a junior in college at UC Berkeley, right after the free speech movement. And I took that year off. And I took that year off. And I didn't, I was planning to study at the Sorbonne,

but then I tasted a strawberry at a restaurant, a wild strawberry. And I just said, oh my God, what is this? What is this? And it turned out they were little Frise de Bois and they only came at this one moment in time and you had to go up in the mountains to pick them because they grew wild. And when they were over, they were over. So today we have some strawberries.

We have strawberries from a store known as Costco, which is a more industrialized strawberry. And we have strawberries from the Nickel Farm and Orchard from Marengo, Illinois, sold just around the corner at a farmer's market. And I thought we could do a little taste test. I'm not going to tell you which is which. Do you think you'll be able to tell? Just on size. Oh, no, no, no. Which one?

One from each plate. No, but I'm just looking at the really big one. And for me, it's very early still for strawberries. And I suspect... Take one. No, no, just one from that plate and one from this plate. I'm going to try one of these too. A little one.

No, I'm surprised because I like the big one on that plate. Which means that... No, no. This big one is from Nichols Farm in Marengo, Illinois. Well done, Alice. Hurrah. Hurrah. It's the first good strawberry I've had this year.

So talk to us about this distinction between slow food and fast food. So talk to us about this distinction between slow food and fast food. Well, when I talk about slow food, I really am thinking about the slow food movement that was started by Carlo Petrini, you know, 30 years ago. And when he talked about, you know, what was happening around the world with people eating food that was being distributed all around, and he felt like slow food was food that was grown by the people in your community and done with care and taste. And he always supported those people. Now the slow food movement, it's in 150 countries around the world of people who really care about how food is grown,

what it tastes like. And he confirmed absolutely the power of taste to change basically the way you live your life. But what is fast food to you? Fast food is not caring about the origin of food. It's not understanding the soil in which it's grown. It's trying to deliver food that is fast, cheap, and easy. So you have a strawberry in Paris, and you get back to Berkeley, and you decide to start a restaurant. Well, I wanted to live like the French.

I wanted to eat like the French. And I couldn't find that food in California. This is the late 60s. And I just, in my naivete, I just said, well, maybe if I start a little French restaurant, the food will come. And guess what? It did.

It came when I was looking for taste and found Bob Kennard, who was a farmer, was looking for taste and found Bob Kennard, who was a farmer, who was a regenerative farmer way back when. And he said, my food is 20% more nutritious than everybody else's. And I laughed at Bob. When you started the restaurant, did you set out to source your food locally? I wasn't thinking about that. I was only looking for taste.

And I wanted to do a menu like the French, no choice. First course, second, salad, cheese, dessert. And I wanted people to experience what I had experienced in France. And it was in the search for taste that we brought people along with us. And then did you decide to only use local farmers? It wasn't a real decision like that. But when we started to buy food from farmers directly, that's what changed everything.

Because we told Bob, we'll pay you the real cost of your food so you can take care of the farm workers. And he said, if you bring me your compost up, I'll send the vegetables down. And this relationship of paying him the real cost got around the state of California, and everybody wanted to sell to us. And I became friends with Masumoto, who had the peaches and the cherries from this person. I got to know all of the ranchers, the farmers, the fishers. But like if you ran out of onions, did you ever go to the supermarket? No.

No, I sort of was a purist about this, looking for only organically grown food. And I think everybody knows that about me now. But I wanted not just the flavor. I wanted the health of it too. And Bob was a great influence on me from the very beginning. But you were a French restaurant, not a health food restaurant. No, we were French. Yes. Yes, we were a French restaurant. No, we were a French. Yes. Yes, we were a French restaurant. After the break, Alice Waters talks about taking her ideas from one restaurant in California to the rest of the country. With Uber Reserve, good things come to those who plan ahead.

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Taste the many flavors of our cultures. Laugh with us. Smile. Joke. And bring each other joy. Come, walk with us. Indigenous Tourism Alberta. When did it click for you that you wanted to take this idea,

this system that you had created, and go beyond the restaurant? What happened was the principal of Martin Luther King Middle School called me up 30 years ago and he said to me, I hear you like gardens and maybe you could come and help beautify my school. And I couldn't resist that temptation and I went to see him. And it's a middle school that had 800 students, middle school kids, teenagers, that spoke 22 languages in their homes. So in a way, it was an incredible challenge to figure out what to do. But immediately when I looked at this school that had been built in 1921 on 17 acres of land, if you can imagine. And part of it was taken over by the city, but there was a vacant lot. It was just full of junk and everything's big concrete areas. And I just said, you know, I see it all. There was a portable building, I said, that could be a kitchen classroom. And oh, out there in that field, we could do a garden classroom.

And why don't we build a cafeteria where we could seat all the kids at tables and serve them. seat all the kids at tables and serve them. And I just had a hole right in, immediately. And Neil said, well, I'll give you a call back. And I said, remember, Neil, it's all or nothing. Well, he called me back, much to my shock. And we built a kitchen classroom in that portable building, not to teach cooking, but to teach all the academic subjects. So you're teaching geography and you're making hummus and pita bread and greens. So you're absorbing through your senses all of the information in a very different way. And then we did the same with the garden classroom, obviously science and math. And why are schools important in your view?

Well, because everyone goes to school or should. It's the one place that we have in common around the world. Everybody eats, everybody goes to school. So if we focus on food and schools, we could make dramatic change. From the beginnings of Shape and Ease, which was 1971, I think, there's been a huge, a lot of progress in the organic food movement. Are you satisfied with that? It's not enough. It's not enough.

It's not enough. But it's amazing that we have very high organic standards in the state of California. But I just know that this is a movement that's been going around the world and that we could, if we gathered all of our expertise, if we decided to decentralize the purchasing of food and if we decided to only buy local food that's organically and regeneratively grown. We could address climate, we could address health, and we could build community,

because that's the beauty of what Chez Panisse is about. You know the people that grow and make your food. Thank you. know the people that grow and make your food. Alice Waters, thanks so much. That's all for today, Friday, June 28th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. The show is made by Catherine Brewer, Maria Byrne, Jonathan Davis, Victoria Dominguez, Pia Gadkari, Rachel Humphries, Ryan Knudsen, Matt Kwong, Jessica Mendoza, Annie Minoff,

Laura Morris, Enrique Perez de la Rosa, Sarah Platt, Alan Rodriguez-Espinosa, Heather Rogers, Our engineers are Our theme music is by Additional music this week from Fact-checking by Our theme music is by So Wiley. Additional music this week from Katherine Anderson, Bobby Lord, and Blue Dot Sessions. Fact-checking by Mary Mathis and Najwa Jamal. Thanks for listening. See you Monday.