Her Recipe for Success: Food, the Environment

The 14th annual World of Food and Wine kicks off this weekend at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Dana Point, and as ever, the chain of events that lasts through the weekend promises to be special.

The weekend culminates Sunday with a special luncheon honoring this year’s Lifetime Achievement Award winner, Alice Waters. Past winners have included food and wine world luminaries Julia Child, Robert Mondavi and Paul Bocuse. But Waters, owner of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, may well be the most influential member of this distinguished group.

Waters is committed--and concerned--about a variety of agricultural and ecological issues, and she puts her beliefs into practice every time she, or one of her chefs, lights a stove burner.

She is a passionate advocate for sustainable gardening, consumer activism and food quality control. She is concerned about genetic engineering of food, the very real possibility that we are destroying most of the world’s topsoil with herbicides and pesticides, and the use of chemicals in our food, such as the widespread use of BGH (bovine growth hormone) in our milk supply. In the midst of these concerns, though, she still manages to run one of the best restaurants on the planet.

One might say that her journey really began as a 19-year-old exchange student in France, where she discovered how sensual food could be. Later, she taught in a Montessori school in Berkeley and did a lot of cooking for her friends. That’s when she realized she liked cooking better than teaching.

“I like chefs and restaurants connected to the organic food supply,” she says. The people who influenced her include English cookbook author Elizabeth David and longtime Provence resident and chef Richard Olney. In this month’s issue of Gourmet, Waters mentions some of the vibrant salad greens she first tasted while visiting Olney.

If you dine at Chez Panisse or upstairs in the more casual cafe, any green salad you eat is likely to have been picked in her restaurant’s private garden, and probably will be the best salad you have ever tasted. Waters is modest, almost contrite, on the subject, though. “I literally brought seeds back from France many years ago,” she says, “and I’m probably in part responsible for those awful mesclun greens you find in supermarkets nowadays.”

Farmers markets, and not supermarkets, are where Waters tells us to look for the best produce, although heightened consumer awareness could change this. “The supermarket wants to sell you what you want to buy,” she says. “If there is increased demand for these good products, the supermarkets will carry them.”

The idea behind her newest book, “The Chez Panisse Cafe Cookbook” is simplicity and accessibility for the home cook. But Waters is also quick to point out that many of the ingredients necessary to create the recipes are found in farmers markets, not always in neighborhood supermarkets.

Until her small food movement goes global, that is, in which case we will all profit.

The Tete de Cuvee Sparkling Wine lunch honoring Alice Waters is 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Sunday at the Ritz-Carlton, 1 Ritz-Carlton Drive, Dana Point. The price is $115. Participating chefs include Paul Bertolli of Oliveto in Oakland and Tracy Desjardin of San Francisco’s Rubicon. For reservations, call (949) 489-5897.

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Other events today at the hotel are:

Cooking with the Masters--California Style, 10 a.m.-1 p.m. $60; poolside barbecue, 12:30-3 p.m. $75; The Cigar Czar’s Secret Stash, hosted by cigar maven Richard Carleton Hacker, 4-5:30 p.m. $90; Edible Gems, a caviar and vodka tasting, 6-7:30 p.m. $200; and the Great American Tasting, a celebration of chefs and wineries, 7-11 p.m. $125.