Alice Waters & The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution

If you’re not familiar with Alice Waters - investigate! Waters founded the famed Chez Panisse in Berkeley, CA in 1971 — a neighborhood bistro that paid homage to her food ethics: eat locally, seasonally and shop at farmers’ markets. This has been her credo long before all things got green. I was lucky enough to go to Chez Panisse in 1991 — great food experiences make for instant date recall — on the arm of a devoted Northern Californian foodie. His Mom was good friends with Alice and their family regularly ate there. From that meal on, my ideas about and passion towards food changed. I wanted simple, fresh foods coming from sources that I knew and trusted. Her latest book, The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution delivers on the title’s promise. And the author, to say she is the mother of the whole food, “fork to farm”, California’s cuisine of using seasonal, organic foods is an understatement. She is a wonderful, radical, unchallengeable force in the culinary realm of eating real! And this latest book does just that — keeps it real.

Mind you, I have 2 of Ms. Waters’ other books: Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook and Chez Panisse Cooking, the latter written with unarguably one of the best chefs ever - her chef Paul Bertolli. But sadly, unless you are a serious cook that dreamt of going to CIA, these 2 books, albeit the first one is great for ideas about preparing a well-rounded multi-course meal, I merely use these books to fantasize about what I might cook one day when I live in Provence and own a La Cornue range. The Art of Simple Food, however, literally makes you want to go to a farmers’ market and come home and cook, well, simple food.

As we close in on Earth Day, remember the pioneers in the movement — those who have paved the way for making local, sustainable food accessible, and who believe, as I do, that whole, organic, seasonal foods make for a healthy person and environment. Ms. Waters is also a member of Slow Food, and the founder of the Chez Panisse Foundation. Chez Panisse Foundation developed The Edible Schoolyard program that “…creates working garden, kitchen, and dining classrooms that provide experiential learning about food…” to school age children and the School Lunch Initiative, “…a comprehensive strategy to change district-wide meal programs by integrating changes in the curriculum and transforming the quality of school food…” Both of these programs can be retrofitted to other school districts in different cities.

So if the upcoming bounty of summer is calling and you want to read the words of the wisest sage leading this food revolution, add this book to your culinary and green lifestyle shelf.

Written by: Michelle Barge