Alice Waters

Alice Waters (born April 28, 1944, Chatham, New Jersey, U.S.) is an American restaurateur, chef, and food activist who was a leading proponent of the “slow food” movement, which billed itself as the healthy antithesis to fast food.

Waters studied French culture at the University of California, Berkeley, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1967. She participated in the 1960s Free Speech Movement, and the idealism that was then prevalent at Berkeley was reflected in her ideology throughout her career. She studied abroad for a time in France, and it was there that her love of farm-to-plate dining took hold. Following graduation, Waters spent a year studying at the International Montessori School in London before returning to California to teach.

In the 1970s the United States was still years away from the “foodie revolution,” which by 2009 had brought farmers’ markets and organic foods to a larger audience. Waters’s prescient passion for whole, unprocessed foods inspired her and her friend Lindsey Shere to found a market-inspired restaurant in Berkeley, California, despite having little capital and no experience as restaurateurs. When Chez Panisse opened in 1971, it was with a relatively untrained staff, a set fixed-price menu that changed daily, and an uncompromising dedication to a vision that seemed to many untenable: Waters wanted to create meals that used only locally grown seasonal ingredients, and she wanted to forge relationships with the producers and suppliers of these ingredients.

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These exacting tenets kept the restaurant in debt for its first eight years of business; it was frequently saved from bankruptcy by loans from Waters’s friends. When Chez Panisse finally started turning a profit, Waters had time to devote herself to other facets of food activism, such as the Garden Project, which provided produce to the San Francisco county jail and work opportunities to its former inmates. In 1996, to celebrate the restaurant’s 25th anniversary, Waters founded the Chez Panisse Foundation, which funded programs that educated young people on responsible agriculture.

The advocacy venture for which she became best known was the Edible Schoolyard, originally established in 1995. Waters began the program by planting a garden in the yard of Berkeley’s Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School. A cooking classroom was installed a few years later, and by 2009 the Edible Schoolyard was a thriving educational tool, though not a source of lunchroom produce. The program expanded to include affiliates in other cities, including New Orleans and Los Angeles. From the Edible Schoolyard grew Waters’s new cause, that of persuading the government to increase funding to improve school lunch programs. Her indomitable dedication to providing schoolchildren with more healthful-eating options earned Waters a fair share of detractors, who argued that seasonal food was a dispensable luxury for already underfunded schools. As with her restaurant, however, her philosophy regarding the project was “If we do it right, the money will come.”

The James Beard Foundation named Chez Panisse outstanding restaurant and Waters outstanding chef in 1992; the foundation also presented her with a lifetime achievement award in 2004. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007, received the French Legion of Honor in 2009, and was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2015. Waters wrote a number of cookbooks and We Are What We Eat: A Slow Food Manifesto (2021; written with Bob Carrau and Cristina Mueller). Her memoir, Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook, was published in 2017.