Cooking Organic, Thinking Holistic

In 1971, Alice Waters, a former Montessori schoolteacher, thought she’d start a little restaurant in Berkeley where she could feed all her friends. She called it Chez Panisse, after the character in a trio of films French director Marcel Pagnol made about Marseilles in the ‘30s. It started as casually as that, a restaurant that so profoundly influenced how we eat now. Today, Waters not only has Chez Panisse, but also Cafe Fanny named after her daughter Fanny. She has founded a garden project at a Berkeley junior high school called the Edible Schoolyard, and has been invited by the director of Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris to create a restaurant for the Louvre.

“Come right in, I’ll be right back,” read the note on the door of Waters’ arts and crafts bungalow in north Berkeley. Just as I sat down at the long table at one end of the kitchen, in walked Waters in a joyous rush. She’d been out to get milk. Her kitchen, which looks out on a view of a towering pine, is anything but high-tech, a spacious and beautiful room built for cooking and reverie with aubergine walls alive with the textures of wood, copper, slate and brick. Her collection of well-used copper pots is stacked on a shelf beneath a butcher-block table. After lighting a fire in the waist-high fireplace, she makes coffee on a sunflower yellow French stove. We sit at the table in front of the fire sipping milky coffee from vintage cafe au lait bowls, our talk punctuated by the snap of the fire.

Question: When I ate at the cafe last night, I was struck, again, by how much has changed in almost 30 years, how much a cook has to work with now--compared to when you started the restaurant. Then, squid was always frozen. The only place, practically, you could find fresh fish was Chinatown. And now, in my local supermarket, I can find cavolo nero 1/8the emerald-black Tuscan cabbage 3/8!

Answer: When you wanted a green bean you had to French one of those Kentucky Wonders, and it would be just about edible after you finished. But a few weeks ago I actually saw the most beautiful ratte potatoes at the Santa Monica farmers market. Those were the ones I’d admired in the Paris street markets, those rather small white potatoes that were oblong and a little waxy--and so good in cold salads. And we have those now.

Q: In fact, Chez Panisse is somewhat responsible for the variety, certainly of produce, and all kinds of foodstuffs that cooks in California today, even home cooks, take for granted. It didn’t just happen by itself.

A: It’s a matter of asking. It’s saying could you, would you? And farmers saying, “Well, if I had the seeds, I could.”

One of my early experiences in France was going to the market in Nice with my friends Martine and Claude. That’s where I first saw mesclun, which was a little farmer’s salad, basically the tiny shoots they’d pull out when they were weeding between the lettuce. It was a wild salad full of sharp little chervil, and wild rocket and escarole that you couldn’t find anywhere except within maybe a 45-mile radius of Nice. It was very specific. Those were the first seeds I brought back. I feel I’m somewhat responsible for that hideous mesclun mix in the supermarkets now that’s mostly radicchio and tatsoi cut up with the scissors! I wonder what most people make of it.

Q: It’s like the fashion establishment co-opting edgy street fashion. And what about the word “gourmet”?

A: I hate it.

Q: Somewhere along the way it’s come to mean someone who is obsessed with everything that’s exclusive, exotic and expensive.

Last night our waitress mentioned that Chez Panisse intends to be 100% organic by the end of the year 2000.

A: We want everything organic. Peppercorns. All the spices. And everything that’s not we just won’t use. And when we do it, I’d like to put the information out on our Web site.

Q: Chez Panisse has a Web site?

A: I don’t even know how to turn on the computer, but in fact there are people at the restaurant who make this happen.

Q: Isn’t that going to be very difficult to go entirely organic? You are not a vegetarian restaurant. What are you not going to be able to have?

A: Well, I don’t think there’s just about anything we can’t have. We’re working right now to get pork organically fed. And talking with our beef supplier, Bill Nieman, who is searching out organic sources for the corn, barley and oat feed.

Q: This really hasn’t been done before, has it?

A: It’s true. There are a number of restaurants that are primarily organic, but haven’t had the time to investigate sugar and chocolate and all of that. We have found a great source for chocolate, for example, but we’ve been moving along slowly. I finally set a deadline for next year.

Q: Why do you want to do it?

A: It’s to convince ourselves (though I’m already convinced) and the people in the restaurant business in particular and home cooks that it is possible. You need to have the models or you can’t envision it.

Q: A lot of people think the appeal of organic has to do with the taste.

A: Well, fortunately, it does have to do with the taste. But the reasons for doing it are so profound and so important. I think we all have to educate ourselves in order to be able to make decisions about everything that goes into our mouths or we’re not going to be eating the way we’re eating now in the next century because we’re destroying all the natural resources. Some experts say we have 50 years at the most of topsoil left. And then what happens? Are we going to be growing our food in the labs?

Q: Also, the range of things that Americans eat is so limited that it becomes another factor. You just can’t slaughter an entire steer and use it only to make hamburger and steaks. You have to appreciate the beef cheeks and ribs and all of the innards, which to one extent or another are almost unmentionable in this country.

A: You come to that understanding once you realize how dependent we are upon nature to feed ourselves. Eating is connected, not only with agriculture, but with culture. Feeding ourselves poorly is alienating us as families around the table. And it’s having a series of consequences that we don’t even begin to take into consideration.

Q: How do you teach taste? I know you have the Edible Schoolyard project to teach children about food and gardens. Most people who grew up on fast food tend to have a palate for sweet, and restaurants pander to that with sweet dressings, salads and sweet sauces, even with meats.

A: I think you have to teach it early on. That’s why we need to teach it in the schools. I’m convinced kids have to have a hands-on involvement with food. They have to put their hands in the earth. They have to grow their vegetables.

They have to get connected in that kinesthetic way with the whole experience through their senses. It’s an old Montessori idea, but I really, really believe that. Not telling them what to feel or taste, but just simply getting them to open up all their senses.

Every kid that lives on this planet needs to know how to take care of the land and how to feed themselves. And how to communicate at the table. It should be as basic as reading and writing and arithmetic, maybe even more important because it’s something you do three times a day your whole life.

Q: Hundreds of chefs graduate from cooking schools each year. Do you think they’re being trained in the right way?

A: I think a cooking school should begin in the garden. To talk about technique without giving people a sense of where food comes from, and learning about everything that grows and its season, seems backward. First, you have to evaluate the taste and understand how that taste changes through the growing season, before you worry about what to do with it.

That’s something that goes on in the restaurant all the time. Even if our produce is picked every day, every day it tastes different. You think the melon is the same one you had yesterday, but in fact it may not be. Maybe it’s perfect with prosciutto one day, and then the next day it’s a little too ripe and more suited to be made into a sherbet. When you follow one vegetable, whether it’s corn or fava beans, through its season, you begin to see how you want to use it.

Q: So you’re saying the dish should come out of the sensual experience of the ingredient. It comes from taste.

A: Yes, and discernment. It takes education to be discerning, but it’s very, very important.

Q: Everyone can affect the choice and quality of produce by what they choose to buy. If they pass up those tired-looking green beans and nobody buys that mesclun that’s turning brown at the edges, the markets will offer something better.

A: We could certainly learn from the old French about not being wasteful too.

The French chef Jacques Pepin once came and demonstrated how he cut up a whole lamb at the restaurant. I could not believe it! He used every part of the whole thing. What a beautiful lesson! We need what other countries call peasant cuisine in this country. Our peasant cuisine is fast food. And we need to find another way.

Q: Last summer I was shocked by the explosion of McDonald’s in the south of France.

A: I keep thinking that part of the reason things have eroded in France is that people thought they would always have all these good things to eat. But it’s like a relationship. You have to work on it all the time. We have to go to the farmers markets and we have to appreciate and talk to the people who are growing that food or they they may not continue to do it. They need to be acknowledged for their work. I think what happened in France is that everyone just took it for granted and didn’t nurture these suppliers and didn’t treasure what they produced, and they got discouraged.

It’s hard work. They saw an easier way and they just took it.

But here, I’m seeing a new kind of mom-and-pop restaurant sprouting up all over--two people who are earning their living by running the restaurant themselves. People who don’t have the expectation of being superstar chefs and making a lot of money or opening lots of places, but who actually like cooking and want to spend their lives doing it. That’s a very, very healthy thing, I think.

Q: If you’re not an owner-chef, it’s hard to find someone to run all these restaurants. Nobody wants to cook anymore. They all want to be executive chefs.

A: I know. All I want to do is go back into the kitchen! 1/8She snorts with laughter. 3/8 I want to get smaller!