Alice Waters and cavemen

Today I started reading an "authorized" biography of Alice Waters and the restaurant that helped shape the restaurant scene as we know it, Chez Panisse. So far it is quite interesting but something on the inside of the back jacket flap caught my attention. Of the woman and her landmark Berkeley, CA establishment it says, "As advocates for fresh, mindfully grown food, prepared simply and eaten with awareness, they have revolutionized how we think about food, how it's grown, how we cook, and how we eat." I was suddenly struck with a little bit of remorse upon reading these words.

For those of you who don't know, despite her lack of formal culinary training (or any real common sense so it seems) Alice Waters created what is considered one of the finest restaurants in this country by championing locally grown, seasonal foods...the mother of "California Cuisine". Until the late 1960's much of the food in restaurants was frozen, canned or otherwise processed. Some may argue that we largely have Alice to thank for chefs now shopping at farmers' markets and sourcing other locally grown/produced items.

What occured to me as I read that jacket flap is that not only is the idea of fresh, local, seasonal food prepared simply not a new one, it is quite ancient. These are the very ideals of regional Italian cooking, passed down from generation to generation. Find the greatest products you can and prepare them in a basic, yet delicious, way. As I thought more about it you can even trace these things back to the very dawn of humanity when cavemen ate what was around out of necessity. The safest, most convenient method to obtain nourishment was to use the resources in the surrounding area. I do of course realize that we are talking about restaurant food vs. hunting and gathering but I honestly don't see a huge disparity. They are different means to an end.

So essentially we are at this low point in culinary history where people are eating processed, highly chemical laden "Food" as people like Miss Waters try to get us back to our roots. Is it just this country or are we as a planet too busy and preoccupied to eat real food? The part that saddens me most is that she is labelled a revolutionary. I am not sad because I don't like her (heck the woman seeks to bring actual vegetables into schools!) but because it says a lot about the state of what we eat in this country. The notion that what we eat should be fresh, local, and seasonal, despite the fact that others have eaten this way for thousands of years, is considered radical. What brought us from the old tradition into this new culture of the illusion of food and how do we get back? Somewhere along the line it became strange to eat fruit in season or meat that isn't infested with fecal matter, perhaps because it is easier to just not care. I can only hope that the pendulum continues to move in the direction of Chez Panisse, Mario Batali, the local farmer and away from high fructose corn syrup, fast food and produce available year round no matter what the cost.