Kimberly Riblet
HRM135 XP
Anthony McPhee
2/21/2011

Alice Waters

I chose Alice Waters. More than any other single figure, she was instrumental in developing New American Cuisine. Alice Waters was Born in Chatham, New Jersey on April 28, 1944. She graduated from the University of California in 1967 with a degree in French Cultural Studies. She is married to Stephen Singer, a wine and olive oil merchant and a painter, and has a daughter, Fanny, who was born in 1983.

Alice interest in food began when she traveled to France during her junior year to study at the University of Paris. She couldn’t get enough of the tastes of fresh local foods. After graduating in 1967, she went back to Europe, for postgraduate study at the Montessori School in London. She returned to Berkeley and began teaching at the Montessori School there. After longing for the same kind of freshness from the local food she tasted in France, she decided to open her own business.

She opened Chez Panisse in 1971, serving a five-course, fixed-price menu that changed daily. This was the great transformative event in American culinary history. The principle of Chez Panisse was that food—both animal and vegetable—should be absolutely fresh, and that meant absolutely local (Weinberger). Because all her food has to be fresh, she only buys from local ranchers, fishermen and farmers. Local farmers’ markets and organic foods grown without synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, or hormones, are just a few of the trends set by Waters that swept the nation in the early 1990’s. Now you can find an organic-produce section in your supermarket produce aisle.

Waters next mission was to teach students about food and nutrition. In 1994, she began working on the Edible Schoolyard at Martin Luther King Junior High School in Berkeley. This project is designed to get the kids involved in planting, gardening, harvesting, cooking, and eating healthy and to improve the lifelong eating habits among schoolchildren. She launched her Chez Panisse Foundation in 1996, to fund similar “Edible Schoolyards” in other school. She also supports the Garden Project, at the San Francisco County Jail, a job- training organization and market garden. This project teaches organic gardening to prisoners and parolees and gives them a place to work when they are released. The garden supplies Chez Panisse and other restaurants.

Alice Waters had also received numerous awards, including being named one of the ten best chefs in the world by the magazine Cuisine et Vins du France; the Best Chef in America, Best Restaurant in America, and Humanitarian of the Year awards from the James Beard Foundation; and an honorary degree from Mills College in Oakland, California (“StarChefs.com”).

Resources:

Brennan, Carol. "Alice Waters Biography." World Biography. Advameg, Inc., 2011. Web. 22 Feb 2011. <http://www.notablebiographies.com/newsmakers2/2006-Ra-Z/Waters-Alice.html>.

Weinberger, Jerry. "America’s Food Revolution." City Journal 19.3 (2009) Web. 21 Feb 2011. <http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_3_urb-american-food.html>.

"Women & Food Alice Waters Biography." StarChefs.com . StarChefs, 2009. Web. 21 Feb 2011. <http://www.starchefs.com/features/women/html/bio_waters.shtml>.