We Are What We Eat

Description

From chef and food activist Alice Waters, an impassioned plea for a radical reconsideration of the way each and every one of us cooks and eats

In We Are What We Eat, Alice Waters urges us to take up the mantle of slow food culture, the philosophy at the core of her life’s work. When Waters first opened Chez Panisse in 1971, she did so with the intention of feeding people good food during a time of political turmoil. Customers responded to the locally sourced organic ingredients, to the dishes made by hand, and to the welcoming hospitality that infused the small space—human qualities that were disappearing from a country increasingly seduced by takeout, frozen dinners, and prepackaged ingredients. Waters came to see that the phenomenon of fast food culture, which prioritized cheapness, availability, and speed, was not only ruining our health, but also dehumanizing the ways we live and relate to one another.
 
Over years of working with regional farmers, Waters and her partners learned how geography and seasonal fluctuations affect the ingredients on the menu, as well as about the dangers of pesticides, the plight of fieldworkers, and the social, economic, and environmental threats posed by industrial farming and food distribution. So many of the serious problems we face in the world today—from illness, to social unrest, to economic disparity, and environmental degradation—are all, at their core, connected to food. Fortunately, there is an antidote. Waters argues that by eating in a “slow food way,” each of us—like the community around her restaurant—can be empowered to prioritize and nurture a different kind of culture, one that champions values such as biodiversity, seasonality, stewardship, and pleasure in work.
 
This is a declaration of action against fast food values, and a working theory about what we can do to change the course. As Waters makes clear, every decision we make about what we put in our mouths affects not only our bodies but also the world at large—our families, our communities, and our environment. We have the power to choose what we eat, and we have the potential for individual and global transformation—simply by shifting our relationship to food. All it takes is a taste. 
 “Waters makes a convincing case that the act of eating is political, with powerful effects on the future of the planet.” —TIME

“Waters, legendary chef and founder of Berkeley’s Chez Panisse, delivers an impassioned manifesto on how food and its quality impacts society and the planet . . . She offers cogent, well-reasoned analyses of the price of convenience, blind trust in advertising, and cheapness, all of which seduce ‘us into losing our desire, confidence, and ability to do things for ourselves.’ Highly convincing and incredibly inspiring, Waters’ fervent entreaty is sure to open eyes and change minds.” —Publishers Weekly

“This beautiful book speaks to the values we need to embrace at this moment in human history: Stewardship, diversity, interconnectedness, simplicity, balance. Reading it has inspired me to do things differently. It will inspire you as well.” —Jane Fonda, author of What Can I Do?
 
“In this warm, passionate and very personal book Alice Waters lays out a stunningly convincing case for changing the way we eat. No jargon, no big words, just Alice talking about all the things that matter most to her. I’m going to give this book to everyone I love.” —Ruth Reichl, author of Save Me the Plums
 
“Alice Waters is my favorite chef, and We Are What We Eat is a beautiful, important book. It’s full of passion, anger at the way things are, and hope for a kinder, fairer, more humane, and vastly more enjoyable future. This book is the culmination of a life’s work, a great life, and is a must read.” —Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation
 
“What Alice has contributed to the world is immeasurable, but this new book We Are What We Eat covers new ground. Alice has dedicated her entire life to people, the planet, and the food we consume. Here, she teaches us that food has an intrinsic value that today’s society takes for granted. Imagine what this world would look, smell, and taste like if more of us followed her lead.” —Ron Finley, The Gangsta GardenerAlice Waters is a chef and the founder/owner of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California. She has won numerous awards, including the National Humanities Medal, the French Legion of Honor Medal, the Cavaliere of the Italian Republic, and three James Beards Awards. As vice president of Slow Food International and founder of the Edible Schoolyard Project, she has helped bring food awareness to people of all ages all over the world.

Introduction

 

I didn’t fully understand the power of food when I opened Chez Panisse in 1971. I knew back then that there was definitely a connection between the counterculture I was part of and the food politics of the day, but the relationship between those two things hadn’t yet coalesced in my mind. I respected the back-to-the-land movement and how it emphasized growing your own food without chemicals or pesticides; we had all read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and, later, Frances Moore LappŽ’s book Diet for a Small Planet. When I was a student at UC Berkeley, the Free Speech Movement and anti-war and civil rights movements were going on around me in the streets. And I lived through CŽsar Ch‡vez’s grape strike and watched how effective it was at focusing people’s attention on the rights of the farmworkers who grow our food. Those politics were all part of me-how could they not be? These were the biggest issues of our time. But that wasn’t why I opened the restaurant. I opened Chez Panisse because feeding people good food felt like the only hopeful thing I could do.

 

Things began to change for me a few years later when, looking for taste, we ended up at the doorstep of the organic farmers, ranchers, and suppliers. Because they chose the best heritage varieties and picked them when they were absolutely ripe, the local, sustainable farmers and gardeners were always the ones who grew the best-tasting ingredients. We started putting those growers’ and suppliers’ names on the menus in order to give a public face to the generally invisible network of agriculture behind the restaurant. Suddenly, people began looking forward to Jim Churchill’s Ojai Kishu mandarins around the New Year or Mas Masumoto’s Central Valley Suncrest peaches at the end of August. They would recognize them. And ask for them. Our customers started experiencing, through their taste buds, the natural differences that geography and seasonal fluctuations made in the agricultural environment around them. We were all learning about terroir and biodiversity through the food at the restaurant. Not only that, the word got around that we were willing to pay farmers directly for their beautiful produce, without a middleman-and that we were willing to pay them the true cost of their food. This gave farmers and ranchers more financial security-and ultimately created an alternative economy for Chez Panisse.

 

Increasingly, this awareness about food was growing in other pockets around the country. There were more and more restaurants discovering and using local, organic ingredients. There were farmers’ markets popping up in communities in every state-markets where customers could get to know the people growing their food. Directly supporting the farmers who came to those marketplaces seemed to me-and many others-like the best way to participate in and encourage this emerging farm-to-table movement.

 

In 1988, I was introduced to Carlo Petrini, the creator of a new grassroots political and educational organization in Italy called Slow Food International. Carlo was-still is-an amazing philosopher and extraordinary visionary, and he has a passion for global food activism built on traditional ways of life. When Carlo spoke, his metaphors illuminated the complex issues of biodiversity and sustainability by connecting them to taste and the pleasures of the table. His big ideas electrified me and validated my own reasons for starting Chez Panisse. For example, Slow Food International was creating an Ark of Taste, which collects and safeguards traditional foods from all cultures that are at risk of extinction. I became deeply involved in and committed to Carlo’s movement. Through Slow Food I met food activists from all over the world: farmers from Ethiopia, cheesemakers from Ghana, seed savers from Nepal, rice growers from Japan-every one committed to preserving tradition and taste in the face of the fast food industry on the rise everywhere. These relationships expanded my understanding of the global issues facing all of us. I was fascinated-but also shocked-to realize that there were people all over the planet coming to terms with the same issues we were grappling with in the United States. I felt the possibility and potential of being part of a global food movement. That slogan from the 1970s immediately came to mind: “Think globally, act locally.”

 

But back in Berkeley, I’d drive five miles outside the city limits and still see fast food restaurants and industrial development spreading across the landscape-usually an agricultural landscape-like a cancer. I kept thinking, What good is what we’re doing at Chez Panisse and other places if it’s not making a deeper impact, if it’s not penetrating the culture at large? The restaurant couldn’t be an island unto itself. I was trying to figure out how we could take the lessons we had learned and the good practices we had cultivated and share them with everyone. How could a deeper impression be made?

 

Watching my daughter grow up during the mid-1990s and witnessing how she and her friends were learning (and not learning) to feed themselves, it dawned on me that a real opportunity lay in the schools. If we could just get to students before they were indoctrinated by the pervasive fast food world around them, then perhaps there could be a chance for deep, long-lasting change.

 

That was when I convinced a Berkeley public middle school principal to start the Edible Schoolyard Project on his campus. There were a thousand sixth, seventh, and eighth graders at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School speaking twenty-two different languages at home. I had been a Montessori teacher before opening Chez Panisse, and from my Montessori training I knew that a hands-on academic curriculum that engaged students about cooking and gardening could be transformational. I had an inkling that a real change could take place-but I couldn’t have imagined the way in which a garden classroom, a kitchen classroom, and a reimagined cafeteria could transform the public school system.

 

I have watched our country’s transition from the victory gardens of World War II to the frozen foods of the 1950s; from the revolutionary activism of the 1960s to the fast food reign of the 1980s, 1990s, and beyond. My experiences from opening the restaurant to the establishment of the Edible Schoolyard Project have shown me over and over again how the power of food can change people’s lives-for better or for worse. Food can enhance our communities, humanize our institutions, and help heal and replenish the besieged environment. Or food can destroy our health and our planet. We are all still witnessing the corruption and degradation of our lives and our environment-in this country and around the world-caused by the industrial food system.

 

This book is about how we got here-a manifesto about the effect that eating has on our personal lives and on our world, and what we can do to change the course. This book is not academic; it is not hammered down with footnotes and references. Everything I discuss comes from my own experiences. How we eat is how we live. This is the guiding philosophy of my life.

 

Fast Food

Culture

 

More than two hundred years ago, the French philosopher Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin said, “The destiny of nations depends on the way they nourish themselves.” I have always been struck by this phrase. I used to think it had to do primarily with cooking and feeding people. But over the years, I’ve wondered whether Brillat-Savarin might have been speaking about something bigger, something much more profound. Maybe he was talking about the basic connection between the way we eat and the world we live in. Maybe he saw quite clearly, on a deep level, how what you eat affects not only your own life but also society, the environment, the whole planet. I have a sense that if Brillat-Savarin were alive today, he might expand his dictum to say, “The destiny of the world depends on how we nourish ourselves.”

 

I do think Brillat-Savarin would see that many, if not all, the serious problems we face today are, at their core, connected to food. I’m not just talking about poverty and hunger, disease and agricultural decay-the obvious ones-but everything: addiction, depression, water use, the abuse of workers, immigration, political dishonesty, the overarching threat of climate change . . . you name it. They’re all, when you get right down to it, connected in some way to the food we eat and the food system that provides it.

 

This may sound reductive. But all the issues I’m talking about are consequences of a deeply systemic condition. I think that unless we deal with this larger, more pervasive condition, all our well-intentioned work to solve the problems of our world will ultimately fall short. In fact, our work is falling short. If we don’t face up to this deeper situation, we’ll be treating the symptoms but not the root causes of the disease itself.

 

What is this deep, systemic condition that underlies all our other problems?

 

The author Eric Schlosser, one of my personal heroes and one of the great muckrakers of our time, has pointed out that in the United States we live in a fast food nation. Sad to say, fast food is the way most people feed themselves in this country. The statistics tell us that eighty-five million people in the United States eat from fast food restaurants on any given day-but I don’t think the definition of fast food begins and ends with restaurants like McDonald’s or Pizza Hut or Subway. I consider fast food to be any type of food that is grown with herbicides and pesticides, industrially mass-produced, and, most often, processed, or ultra-processed, with additives and preservatives. It could be the food on your grocery store’s shelves, or what you buy at the checkout of a convenience store, or what’s delivered right to your doorstep through a convenient delivery app.

 

 

But the thing we don’t really understand-and it’s something I’ve just come to recognize over the past decade or so-is that fast food is not only about food. It’s bigger than that. It’s about culture.

 

Culture affects the way we look at the world-how we operate in it, how we see ourselves, how we express ourselves, how we interact with one another, what we believe. It influences how we choose the clothes we wear, what we buy and sell, how we do business. Culture influences the way we set up our homes, our architecture, our parks, our schools, our entertainment, our journalism, our politics . . . and on and on. Culture is the invisible moral structure underneath us, guiding us all subconsciously and shaping everything we do. Fast food culture has become the dominant culture in the United States, and it’s becoming the dominant culture in the world.

 

This is happening because fast food culture, like all cultures, has its own set of values-what I call “fast food values.” Values determine the behavior, which ultimately creates the culture. If you’re eating in a fast food restaurant, or in a fast food way, not only are you malnourishing yourself, but you’re also unwittingly digesting the values of this fast food culture. Those values are becoming part of you-just like the food. And once those values are a part of you, they change you. You begin to have a different outlook on things, different cravings, different moral standards and expectations. Now your desires and hungers are being programmed by this fast food culture, and you may not even realize it; it’s subconscious. But nevertheless, your world starts to reflect the values you’ve ingested. You begin to accept these values as truths: that everything should be available to us, all the time; that more is always better; that food should look and taste the same, no matter the season, wherever we are in the world; that time is money, and speed should be cherished above all else; that our choices, food-related and otherwise, have no consequences.

 

This is the soil that I feel all our other problems grow out of: fast food culture and its values. We need to examine the consequences of these fast food values so we know what we can do to change them.

 

convenience

 

Convenience is the fast food value that says

everything should be effortless, a breeze. A few seconds spent on your smartphone and Uber delivers a burrito to your doorstep; you pull off the freeway, enter a drive-through, and have chicken nuggets in no time. It’s the value of efficiency and leisure-the “easy” in “fast, cheap, and easy.” Convenience does make many aspects of our lives less effortful, but the

addiction to it creates problems. If a task can’t get done easily, why bother? Why even do it? Convenience seduces us into losing our desire, confidence, and ability to do things

for ourselves.

 

There’s no doubt that many people’s lives all over the world have been vastly improved by convenience: tractors, washing machines, dishwashers, frozen food, smartphones, Siri, and Alexa have all liberated many of us to live more friction-free lives, accomplishing more tasks with much less effort. I remember, as a little girl, poring over the Sears, Roebuck catalog when it arrived at our house, looking through page after page of pictures of children’s toys, gardening tools, vacuum cleaners, clothes, hearing aids, televisions, everything you could imagine; it was as thick as an encyclopedia. The Sears, Roebuck catalog debuted in 1887, and by the 1950s it was a revolutionarily convenient way for families to buy products and have them arrive right at their doorsteps. Farmers could order their feed through it. You could even buy a prefabricated house from it. But what was originally championed and promoted as a really good idea-a liberating way to make our lives easier and less arduous-has become something else entirely. Many of us don’t even think of cooking meals from scratch anymore, because we assume it’s too difficult and demands too much time. Many of us don’t even want to leave the house to go shopping. With convenience, we tend to look for the easy way out, the mechanical way, the “outsourced” way. We begin to forget-or don’t want to learn-how to do practical, challenging things, like growing our own food. And what can I say? That process of growing a plant from seed is, by its very nature, inconvenient. You have to care for the plant, water it, watch over it, and wait for all of that hard work to come to fruition, and still there are factors that are out of your control. Farmers’ markets are inconvenient, too. You might not find what you’re looking for when you go, and they’re open only on certain days. When I was a college student studying in France in 1965, I fell in love with the way the French shopped, the way they cooked, the way they ate. I felt that those daily habits and rituals-which took a lot of time-led to both delicious food and a more meaningful life. It was an awakening. That slower, more earthbound way of living resonated with me: going to the market every day; finding ripe, seasonal vegetables to cook with; having that daily experience of beautiful food. This wasn’t the way people shopped in America, where you made one trip a week to the supermarket and you were done. When I returned from France, I kept up French shopping practices: I would visit the little Japanese-run produce market across town, and I would drive from Berkeley to San Francisco and make my pilgrimage to the French charcuterie and the Italian delicatessen with the best olives and oil.

US

Additional information

Dimensions	0.5700 × 5.5000 × 8.2000 in
Imprint	Penguin Books
ISBN-13	09780525561552
ISBN-10	0525561552
Author	Alice Waters
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	CKB041000, HEA017000
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