Green Goddess: Alice Waters

We at Eco-Women salute Alice Waters today. (This is where we whip off our straw hats and yell out, “Sah-loot!”)

Rescuing our planet means more than driving a hybrid and shunning bottled water. Food production and consumption use a LOT of energy and resources. They also leave behind a LOT of waste. Consider these facts from Sustainable Table:

* More than 1/3 of our fossil fuels and raw materials in the U.S. go towards raising animals for food.

* Agriculture accounts for 70% of all water use.

* Researchers from the Department of Economics at the University of Essex put the annual cost of environmental damage caused by industrial farming in the United States at $34.7 billion.

* Approximately 23% of the energy used in our food production system is allocated to processing and packaging food.

* As bountiful as our nation’s agriculture is, we are hardly self-sufficient. To supply the American diet, in 2001 we imported 68.2 percent of our fish and shellfish, 27.3 percent of confectionary products, 21.4 percent of fruits, juices, and nuts, 15.5 percent of vegetable oils, and 9.3 percent of red meat.

Fortunately, many years ago a young revolutionary named Alice Waters decided to “go against the grain” and began addressing the health and environmental issues associated with food production. She was passionate about food — where it came from, how it was grown, and how it tasted. In 1971 (the same year Enviro-Girl was born — karma or coincidence?), Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse, a restaurant dedicated to serving only the highest quality, seasonal and locally produced food in Berkeley, California. Today Chez Panisse is rated the second best restaurant in America by Gourmet Magazine and remains committed to serving only the best quality food produced by sixty local suppliers — all as concerned about the gastronomic and environmental State of our Union as Alice Waters.

We at Eco-Women believe that Alice Waters’s greatest contribution, however, is The Edible Schoolyard. In 1994 Alice Waters took an interest in Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School. The social, community, health and environmental issues surrounding the school and the students prompted her to help them grow a garden. From that garden came fresh food. From that fresh food came cooking classes. From cooking classes came meals. From meals came communal experiences that drew the students and staff closer together. By engaging the students, hands-on, every step of the way, Alice Waters taught them how to respect the earth and reconnect with its power to provide for us. The Edible Schoolyard and her subsequent School Lunch Initiative exposes children to food production, ecology, and nutrition, meaningful work, and fresh & natural food.

Today Alice Waters continues her mission to revolutionize people’s diets — from the food we consume to the way we obtain it. She preaches the gospel of sustainable food production, raging against the corporate machines responsible for most of the crap in our diets. Her latest mission is the school lunch, the last bastion of hope in her opinion. Her dream is to provide every child in every school with good food, healthy food and delicious food. I’ll end this post in her own words, because Alice Waters, besides being a Green Goddess, is far more eloquent than me.

“Now if every school had a lunch program that served its students only local products that had been sustainably farmed, imagine what it would mean for agriculture. Today, twenty percent of the population of the United States is in school. If all these students were eating lunch together, consuming local, organic food, agriculture would change overnight to meet the demand. Our domestic food culture would change as well, as people again grew up learning how to cook affordable, wholesome, and delicious food…

Forty years ago, a presidential commission in America told us our children were physically unfit and that we had to launch a national physical fitness program. The country responded by building gymnasiums, buying equipment and training new physical education teachers, and by making physical education a required part of the curriculum in every school. Today we are worried anew over the health of our children. Child obesity is shocking, and at the present rate of increase, one out of every three children can be expected to develop diabetes, and for African American children, the statistic is one out of every two. We must respond by bringing real food, nutritious food, back into the schools and into the curriculum. We must create new incentives for educators to integrate real food into the lives of their students. Perhaps the best and most radical way to do this is to give credit for school lunch, just as credit is given for physical education or for math or science. This would add a new dimension of integrity to the lunchroom, placing it on a par with the classroom, and breathing new life and dignity into learning how to eat.

What we are calling for is a revolution in public education—a real Delicious Revolution. When the hearts and minds of our children are captured by a school lunch curriculum, enriched with experience in the garden, sustainability will become the lens through which they see the world.”

Alice Waters: Slow Food, Slow Schools

Transforming Education through a School Lunch Curriculum

Curious for more? Check out Chez Panisse Foundation Chez Panisse or American Masters