Welcome everyone to another episode of kiss
the ground. Today we chat with Alice
waters, an amazing chef, restaurant
tour and author. Alice is the chef
and founder of she pennice, a
restaurant in Berkeley, California, famous for
creating the farm to table experience,
and her work with the edible schoolyard initiative
and her own school lunch initiative has
served as an inspiration to many. She
even inspired Michelle Obama's White House Organic
Vegetable Garden. Today, Alice is here
to chat about her trip to France
that sparked her love for food and how
that led to the opening of a
restaurant that serves organically and regeneratively grown produce
and her lifelong effort to inspire others
to rethink their relationship with food. My
Life, my purpose was to be
a protector or to care for mother for
nature. Soil really is the nutritional
bank account for our whistance. Together we
can do something that we've never done
before. We can rebuild our ECO system,
our degraded soils and our degraded waters
like this, freedom to me is
the ability, the right to be
all of who you are. I think
we can all do our roles,
even if you're not a farmer. From
the words of Roomy, let the
beauty you love be all that you do.
There is hundreds of ways to kneel
and kiss the ground. A lie
was born in New Jersey right after
World War Two and I didn't realize that
I looked a very different childhood than
children do today. I was in a
little small town about a Nour from
York in Mars County and my parents didn't
have very much money, but they
had a huge victory garden that they planted
during the war part of the war
effort, and they kept it actually their
whole lives. They that garden had
to be wherever they lived. Ultimately they
came out to California and they still
had that little garden in the backyard.
Victory Gardens, or war gardens as
they were often referred to, gardens created
during World War One and World War
Two as a way for folks at home
to help with the war effort by
preventing food shortages. It really represent it
complete delight during the summer months because
it began with strawberries when I was very
young. I just go out there
and pick him up to pine and eat,
but tomatoes and corn were exceptional.
Peppers from the garden and I didn't
experience good cooking in my Familey.
I guess my mother cared about help but
she never learned how to cook.
And Sara, she was, you know,
at the mercy of the fast food
and strand the s that was putting
out frostant food. All of that. She still so made apple thoughts from
the garden and we had that during
the winter. But we never ate out
of season. We never had cornered
tomatoes except in the summer. I think
really know what eight out of season
at that time or eight food important from
other countries. It just was the
way we did. We all ate at
the dinner table. We had to
be there at seven o'clock on the nose
and I basically played outside all of
the time. My parents, Di didn't
have a television, so we didn't
come in until we were called for dinner,
and that definitely made an impression on
me about the beauty of seasonality.
It wasn't a hardship, it was
something that we look forward to, but
we were going to eat in the
summer, even with a relationship with her
parents. Victory Garden, Alice didn't
think much about food growing up. I
don't think I was particularly interested in
food before that. That was a very
picky either. I just stiff.
I understood for my mother I should be
eating Brown bread and vitamins, but
I didn't. I didn't love food.
When Alice was nineteen years old,
she was studying French culture at the University
of Berkeley. Before the start of
her junior year, she decided to take
a year off and booked a trip
to France so she could experience the country
firsthand. That trip was life changing
and opened her eyes to so many new
possibilities, especially when it came to
food. I was complete brought into an
experience of eating a little small restaurants
and seeing the farmers markets on my way
to school and being fascinated by them. I think it was the beauty of
the whole culture, which at that
time was a slow food culture, in
that I don't even think that they
had all of oil in Paris because it
came from the south trance. They
had the food that was available in and
around Paris and that was a reagion
of beautiful butter from Brittany and Normandy and
it was just see food that came
from the it channel and maybe some oysters
out here from the Atlantic Ocean,
but I I just felt this aliveness of
food, the hot bag at the
APPRICCUT APRICUT shamp. I was willing to
wait in line to get my and
we were always reading the Menus and trying
to see who had the the meal
that was most appealing. I just fell
in love and when I came back
I wanted to live like the French and
that's what I've been trying to do
ever since then, truly. But it
was more than just food that Alice
fell in love with. It was the
culture and their relationship with food that
sparked something inside her. I never really
learned how to speak French well,
but I think I had an immersion and
French culture that was very deep and
art and music, not just food,
Ala and in a way of living
that that was about having a picnic and
apart on the weekend. Having children
at that time came at home and ate
with their parents lunch from the school. Can you imagine having two hours off
in the middle of the day when
everybody gathered and work stopped and he ate
lunch? I think that's what Julia
Child shall in love with too. It
was beautiful way of living and food
was central to it, but it was
about a much bigger picture. Before
Alice's trip, she had read about the
global food system during her studies.
She noted the works of Francis More Le
Pays Diet for a small planet and
Rachel Carson's silent spring. But it didn't
really all connect for me until I
was looking for tastes after I got back
from France and when I started shape
her eyes and was thinking that somehow,
if I had a restaurant, I
would be able to find that at food
that tasted like it did in France. And I was naive and the sense
that I I didn't realize that it
came from the way food was grown and
eating it in season, and so
it wasn't mental. I connected up with
the local organic farmers and ranchers did
I understand, and once I got connected
in that way, I just knew
that it would make shapennese exceptional if we
were able to really buy food directly
from them. And that's how it all
began. In one thousand nine hundred
and seventy one, alice founded Shapannese,
a restaurant that was dedicated to bring
organically grown produce from farms to her tables
and we had been connected with farmers
all around California that we were buying directly
from. So we were giving all
of our money right to the farmer picking
up the food or they would bring
it to us. Many time, I'm
just that would take the scraps from
the restaurant back with them. and Luckily
the first farmer that we met.
My parents actually went around California looking for
a farm for us that was organic, that could be our main stay farmer,
and they narrowed it down to three
people and they felt like Bob Kennard
was the only one it was crazy
enough to work with us and we didn't
know at that time that he was
a regenerative farmer. It wasn't until the
s the alice began familiarizing herself with
regenitive agriculture and the benefits of how a
healthy ecosystem can deliver healthy, clean
food. But when we met Bob Right
in their early S, he made
such an impression because he said his vegetables
were ten times more nutritious than anybody
said body else's and we laughed. We
left. For sure Bob sure and
and then, of course, worse,
we come to find out that they're
way more than ten percent and that he
was right. But he wanted the
soil to be all that it could be.
So we you go to the farm
and and it didn't look like anybody
else's if there weren't roses, neat
rows of vegetable. Everything was growing sort
of together and it's ECO system that
he worked out and you had to pull
almost the weeds aside, pull up
the carrots, and it was just an
amazing experience to to meet him and
we were extremely lucky to find to build
a relationship way back when, because
he brought all of the values right through
the kitchen door of Shapennese. He
did. He would say, you sent
back stems of the chart. Why
didn't you cut them off? Why didn't
use them? I don't want to
have my food not used in a way
that that makes me feels like it's
valuable to you. Think about that.
Use All of the PEG table.
And then he started sending it was some
of the weeds that and he said
figure out how to use the personally and
the nettles, and so we did. We've been making the most delicious Metal
Pieeces, that that all of this
is part of this big ecosystem that is
so important. Ten he made me
really understand that that our bodies certainly like
that carrot in the ground and what
is it around juts and what we we
eat can deeply, deeply nourishes.
So the ground around that carrot, it's
giving the carrot the nutrition that the
carrot is giving us. Bob Kennard is
the mastermind behind pet a luma's green
string farm, which has been supplying Alice's
restaurant for over thirty years. Oh, he's he's one of those people who
really indoctrinated us, and the right
way. You know, where we we
all learned together. HMM. Yeah, I'm remembering days in the Catholic gratitude
days when we had like that's sixty
five different vendors. How insane that is,
and yet you know, it's it's
it's beautiful to it is. You
know, Ralent, that's something very
important to talk about because the reason the
you know, those big companies are
are concentrating on giant industrial farms to pick
everything up together and deliver it all
as being the easy, convenient way to
receive food. And yet it's a
really meaningful it to receive food is to
know the people who are growing,
who are producing, and to actually have
a relationship, to go out to
their ranch to see how their how the
chickens are free ranging and what the
landscape is like, how much they love
the work that they do and how
lucky I am to be able to support
them that. This has been the
greatest part of running a restaurant. Yes,
I love to be cook good food
and feed it to people in the
dining room, but I also love
to give them a peach from MOSMAS SOMOTO's
farm and to know all about the
variety, to know all about how he
grows that, how it only happens
at this moment in time and and how
how distinctive that flavor can be.
And it's sort of opened your mind and
that is that magic that excites me. And the industrial food system has just
eliminated all of that human connection and
the beauty that you experience when you're when
you're really using food that has just
been picked. It hasn't aliveness about it
has so lothenticity and, needless just
say, taste. So here you're awakened.
I'm always awakened by the seasonal experience
of food and it kind of renews
my my we're reinforces the the change
of seasons makes me feel like I'm part
of nature. This idea of stopping
to appreciate food is highlighted in Alice's new
book titled We are what we eat, a slow food manifesto. Slow Food
Culture is at the core of Alice's
philosophy. Her book details the harm of
industrial farming and the fast food industry
and offers a solution to eat in a
slow food way. I was really
wanting to know how we lost our human
values and such a short period of
time. It's only really been sixteen,
the most seventy years that we have
left seasonality behind, that we have purchased
food from around the world, that
we don't need to hit the table anymore,
that we want food to be fast, cheap and easy. It's never
been about that. It's food,
as always spend something precious. We always
wanted money for food more than anything
else, and now food is last on
the list and we've understood that it
that it should be available two seven,
that it's completely something disconnected to the
seasons. They want Avocados all year long,
no matter where we are in the
world and it's that that kind of,
I call it a fast food and
dctrination that has really changed us.
And so I am hoping, if
that we can see that that when we
pay attention to what we eat,
that we can bring these human values back
into our lives. We we can. It changes the way that we see
the world, and I really believe
this that the destiny of nations depends on
how we nourish ourself. As briat
sufferance and way back when, the French
philosopher that that really we are what
we eat, and when we eat fast
food, we eat the values that
come along with it. But it's okay
to eating our car that that we
you know, it doesn't matter about waste,
there's always more where that came from, when we know that we're destroying
the world, and to think that
there is an option of buying food that
is not only delicious but nutritious and
the way that it's being grown, as
pulling the carpet out of the atmosphere
and put it down in the ground,
that we can address all of the
critical issues of this time that we're living
in with something so desirable. Yes, it's hard to imagine why we're not
doing it, and that's why I
can't think of any other place to begin
then in the public schools and feeding
our children reach gender tip. Organic food
for schools, lunch for every kid, MMM MMM, free, free.
Yes, Alice has been a part
of many movements dedicated to providing and teaching
the importance of responsible agriculture, but
she doesn't refer to these acts as activism.
I've never done any sort of activist
work. Now, let's say that
again. I've I feel like I've
never done work that I didn't want to
do, that I wasn't really passionate
about. That I'm I'm just looking for
the things that that make my life
meaningful and nature is at the top of
the list. It's where the beauty
is and the bio diversity is something so
exceptional to me and I'm fascinated by
it and it's what has really engaged me
with food and always wanting to learn
more about it. Never it's never exhausted,
it's just endlessly interesting. In one
thousand nine hundred and ninety five,
alice founded the Edible School Yard,
a nonprofit organization that transformed public education by
providing a guard for children to get
their hands on experience with nature. It
really began with an ill enlightened principle
of a middle school in Berkeley. Neil
Smith called me up and he asked
me if I could come and see school.
He was very interested and having me
beautify in some way, he said
on the phone, and I agree
to go and see. Now this was
a middle school with a thousand kids, six seventh and eighth graders, and
it was built on a piece of
plan of seventeen acres back in one thousand
nine hundred and twenty one. And
since that time it had grown so much
that there were a thousand children they
are now. But the land itself was
very big and part of it had
been taken over by the city, but
another part was just kind of had, you know, temporary buildings on it,
just sort of broken up asphult and
and and late to waste. And
so I walked around school with the
principle and I had a big fish and
right away, being a monastory teacher
that I was, I said, Oh
my God, we could make a
garden and have a garden classroom, not
for teaching gardening per se, but
for teaching all the academic subjects because monastory
beliefs that are senses are pathways into
our minds. So we need to be
touching, tasting and smelling, listening
and looking very carefully, and that can
happen out in the garden. And
so it's a math class, you could
be a science class, it could
be an art class, could even be
a music class. The same time
you're listening, you're smelling, you're picking
the raspberry or your experiencing nature.
And then we I saw the kitchen bundle
that had been there and I just
said, Oh my God, we can
make a kitchen classroom again, not
to teach cooking per se, but to
teach history and math and maybe even
a language. But you're cooking the food
of that country. So you're in
the geography of the Middle East and you're
making tea bread and you're making hummus
and maybe you're cooking spicy Greens. But
the students just love these classes and
I can say with great conviction that if
they grow it and they cook it, they all eat it. But I
can also say that what they learned
in their academic subjects, in the garden
or kitchen classroom, they will never
forget because it's really come through all of
their senses and they they remember and
I imagined that we would have a big
cafeteria and built out in that blacktop
behind the school and we could have a
space for kids could sit down and
eat school lunch together again. I could
imagine it almost has an academic experience
and that, you know, you could
have a teacher at the table and
you're talking about the food or you might
be talking to each other as part
of, you know, a lunchtime conversation
and that's that's meaningful and connected to
what you're studying actually in the classroom.
So I told Nail that's what I
have in mind and he said, well,
I get back to you and I
didn't hear from him for about six
months and then he called and he
said we're ready, we're ready to do
it. And he said please don't
talk about the free school lunch right away,
and I said, but, Neil, is all or nothing. I
want to make an experiment here,
and he said you can do you a
garden cast room and the kitchen classroom, but let's wait a little bit before
we talked about school lunch because it
will frighten people. But Alice wanted to
go above and beyond teaching students the
importance of healthy eating, but actually implementing
healthy eating into the students school lunches. And she wanted to make sure that
these sustainable meals would be free to
all students, which might sound impossible,
but not to Alice. But that
is something that I know is possible to
do. I know it's possible to
buy food directly, like we've been doing
for fifty years at shape and meats
for the school system, but it needs
it means that we need to really
dispel the myths that we cannot do this,
there are too many students, that
students don't like that food, they
don't want to eat it, and
that that we don't have the money to
make that happen. These are all
fast food miss that we can buy organic,
retender to food, we can make
it affordable, we can fit it
into the USD reimbursement and we can
stimulate the act economy in every state of
this country. If we bought food
directly from the farmers gave them the money,
they would want to sell it to
the school and just think of how
many people we could put in business. I mean making Tortilla's bread, dairies,
we have to limit the meat and
cheese, but we know from the
experience of the school and from the
experience of the network that we have have
developed over the twenty five years that
we can make food that's culturally diverse.
We have almost six thousand schools that
are connected to the APICAL squirard project around
the world and in every state of
this country, and we know that they
are all practicing stewardship of the land. They are all belief in nourishment and
in community and diversity. They all
get equity, they all are teaching through
a garden or a kitchen classroom and
we can learn from them. And so
you're saying that there's six thousand schools
around the country, in the world that
have adopted parts of, or are
identified as part of, the edible schoolyard
curriculum and programming. Yes, and
maybe some just simply, you know,
have a little garden and maybe a
place to cook in the garden, but
they all believe in these values and
teaching them to children when they're young and
so that they may be first graders, so they may be college students.
They believe in learning by doing,
they believe in the education of the senses
Alice is hoped to provide all students
in the country with a free school lunch.
Is An ongoing effort and after she
saw the effects of food insecurity brought
on by the ongoing pandemic, she's
even more motivated to make a difference in
the school lunch program we are really
worried about our children and we're just wanting
to have children eat healthy food.
But health begins in the soil. If
anybody says differently, they are not
understanding how it all works and it doesn't
begin in the supermarket and choosing fruits
and vegetables. Yes, it's better than
eating sugary foods, but it's not
getting to the place of health. And
we have a diabetes epidemic one and
for children, it's going to have diabetes.
How could we not worry about the
food that they're eating? And I'm
shocked that we are not putting this
together and understanding at this moment in the
time, because of the climate crisis, that we are not changing absolutely all
the food that we are serving in
the public school system. There are two
things that are universe, or so, food and education. And if we
put those together, if we decided
to reimburse schools for local reachenderative organic food
in the school we could address the
deep problems that we have in our society
and I know it can happen.
And we have to stop giving money to
fast food and give it to slow
food. Over at you see Davis's aggy
square campus and Sacramento, California,
is another one of Alice's efforts to further
the education of so many young people
and their educators through agriculture. The Alice
Waters Institute for Edible Education serves as
a Training Center for K through twelve educators
and as a research hub for leaders
in the field of a generative organic agriculture,
Sustainable Food Systems, climate change,
education and public health. And I
want it to be a place where
when people walk into the building, they
sense the values, they feel like
they're in a place that really cares about
them. That is try to make
stewardship and nourishment and, as I said,
acquitty head and community sort of central
to the whole teaching that we will
have a wonderful open kitchen, that
we will have gardens on the roof building,
that we're thinking about every material that
we're using for creating the building,
making them all sustainable and right for
that place for thinking about how to teach
in a reach generative way, which
is something that really interests me. We
been trying to do that at shapiness. We Are we're not having sort of
main chef at the top. We're
having a group of people that all contribute
to the way the food tastes.
They all have their input and we that's
the way that we can get to
something that's greater than some of the parts
is if we all contribute our knowledge
to that purpose, and I think the
the institute could be a central place
to teach the food service directors, and
I have great hopes for the University
of California in terms of leadership, because
they're spaced out over the state and
they could really, with their expertise and
their brilliance, they could make a
path for k through twelve in the state
of California. We need to learn
how do we purchase food in this way?
How can we support the people who
are taking care of the land and
their farm workers, and we have
to learn how to do that, and
I just want to say that that
is something that is not difficult to do
it, but it takes a willingness. It takes an openness and it takes
a belief in the process and really
alice couldn't have picked a better school to
team up with on this project.
The University of California is currently conduct its
own carbon neutrality initiative and working to
become carbon neutral by two thousand and twenty
five as a way to help curve
climate change. And on top of that,
we do inedible education course in the
business school at the University of California
that we started at forty of birth
day of Shapenny, and it's so important
that students have accredited courses that are
connecting the dots between what's happening and natural
world and how people are being fed
and how how food is vital and so
many ways to solving our problems and
bringing us together grab the table. Alice
spend so much of her time nourishing
and healing the world through her agricultural efforts,
but it's also important for Alice to
nourish herself. I take a walk
every morning, every morning and I
walk just out of the House and up
the hill and it's always an experience
of nature that is is changing every day.
You know you're seeing not just food
growing but flowers and just the temperature
of the day, the clouds in
the sky. It's frightening when we see
the smoke and the sky. But
I haven't awareness of time and place,
and that's really important to me.
I love having sort of a weekly dinner
with friends. We all cook together, we I buy my fooded farmers market.
People come over for dinner and Sunday
we all cook, we all eat
together, we all cleaned it up
and it's it's a punctuation in the week.
It's so important that we have this
moment, even if we're by ourselves.
I always light a candle at the
table when I'm eating just to sort
of remind myself of the ritual and
that I want to be seated. I
do I want to eat on the
run. Not Eating on the run is
definitely a challenge for many people.
We all have busy lives and busy schedules
to adhere to. But if you
listen to Alice and the ways that she
values the food she puts on her
table every day, you might be convinced
to slow down and enjoy your meal
a little more and, of course,
make sure you're eating in season.
It opens up the world of food in
a way that you can never imagine. You can only eat ripe food if
you eat and see them, because
I don't want you know, yes,
I do. You know sometimes preserved
food for another season. I cold feet
tomatoes or I think about things that
that that can be preserved. Well,
the things that are dry, things
that you know, nuts and berries and
all the different fraudis of food you
can eat during the winter time, all
the kinds of of grains and all
of that have to be part of the
big picture of a seasonal diet.
But the pleasure of letting go when it's
over, and those teaches are over
right now. I don't think about them
until next year and I'm looking for
what's snack. I'm looking for the pears.
I'll be readies and and the pomegranates
and the apples. I'm looking for
the Brussels sprout. So looking for
the next thing and when that's over,
it's over. So my life during
the course of the year has just change
built into it. I think it
opens my mind in general to change,
to to looking for the bio diversity. It's thrilling for me to have ten
colors of carrots. Can you believe
we have ten now? We have,
you know, more run colored carrots, and every day you can cook them
differently and you're never tired of them
and they last a very long time.
They're nutritious and affordable. It's like
a squash and beans, tried beans,
every color of the rainbow, every
size, every way that you can mix
them and flavor them with spices from
around the world. It's so it's so
endlessly interesting to me as a cook
to to see all the colors of the
eggs. Can you believe we have
blue and green eggs? Every student at
the outible school yard wants to go
and and get the eggs and eat see
the different chickens that lay the different
eggs, and it's like a lesson in
biodiversity that you could never explain in
words. It you have to hold that
egg, crackhead and eat it,
fry it's, it's it's what really excites
me, as you could tell.
So, Alice, how do you kiss
the ground? I kiss the ground
every day by knowing where my food comes
from, by knowing how it was
ground, how it was Ray, knowing
that I am supporting the people who
take care of the land and their farm
workers for the future of this planet. I know that I I'm right there
and in fact, sometimes I go
out. I'm just losing my mind on
a zoom and I go right outside
in my backyard and I like camp on
the ground, and I smelled the
ear of that. I beach, ever,
and I took a base all leaf
I smell it. I make some
mint teason, just pouring hot water
over the leaves and I feel very,
very connected.