FOOD:American food guru Alice Waters bemoans the unhealthy fast-food culture and yearns for a return to proper home-cooking, or "slow food", writes Catherine Cleary
As she sees Ireland follow the US down the road to obesity, she is close to deciding that our generation is beyond help 'I couldn't live without herbs. I want rosemary . I like thyme. I like things that are aromatic. I like garlic toast'
Alice Waters doesn't do glib. A 40-minute conversation with the US's most famous chef feels not so much like an interview as an audience with a high priestess. She has done more interviews than I've had organic, locally-sourced hot dinners. And she turns 64 on Monday. Yet Alice Waters still has an intensity that sometimes makes her stop mid-sentence and draw a ragged breath to keep herself from weeping.
Maybe one of the reasons she is so emotional is that Alice Waters has almost given up on us. The mother of slow food is close to deciding that our generation is past fixing. There is also the fact that she is worried about the planet and whether we will equip future generations with the survival skills for an uncertain future.
The green guru who preaches not so much slow food as slow living has been brought to Ireland by the Food Safety Authority to address a meeting of food-safety inspectors in Killarney. She hopes to persuade the people, sometimes seen as the white-coated nemesis of the woolly-jumpered artisan producer, that food is a living thing that needs to be treated differently to other products. She is also launching Terra Madre (mother earth), a slow food event due to take place in Waterford in September.
In Dublin she is staying in the Leeson Street guest house Number 31 with her friend, Darina Allen. It is not her first visit to Ireland. She has come on visits to the Allen home many times. They are "sort of soul sisters" Darina Allen says.
My walk to Leeson Street on the way to meet her provides plenty of questions about how to reconcile her philosophy on living and eating with modern life. In a steady stream, the luckier office workers are walking home along the canal past gridlocked cars. Some of them look tired, pale and hungry in their dark suits on the bright evening. None of them appears to be carrying a bag of freshly-grown seasonal vegetables to provide an antidote to a day at the office. What will they eat when they get home?
In Waters's world these hungry people would have shopped carefully and thoughtfully at a farmers' market at the weekend. In their fridges a chicken broth made from the bones of an organic bird would provide a base for a nourishing soup. Some fish or chicken with fresh leaves and new potatoes would be a "10-minute meal". It would help if they could pluck the salad leaves and herbs from their own small vegetable patch. None of it would take longer than waiting for the pizza delivery person to arrive.
Waters was born in New Jersey in 1944, and graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a degree in French cultural studies before going to London to train as a Montessori teacher. On a trip to France at the age of 19, she fell in love with the way of life and eating. In 1971, she opened Chez Panisse back home in Berkeley. The restaurant still serves a single fixed-price menu that is changed every day, presenting only food in season, as close to home-cooking as a restaurant can be. They famously once served a perfectly ripe peach for dessert. There it was, just the fruit, whole, uncut and unadulterated, sitting in the middle of a plate.
Although mention of her name can make foodies go weak at the knees, she arrives without the trappings of ego that the typical celebrity chef seems to see as part of the job description. She is a hard-working cook with clever hands, who is happiest in the almost meditative world of chopping, stirring and creating fragrant, real food. This evening she walks down from her room looking fresh, in a grey jersey dress and a tiny CND symbol in gold on a chain at her throat. She looks about 20 years younger than her age.
Does she ever grow weary of it all, after nine books, countless interviews and nearly 40 years of trying to teach the world how to eat? "Well it's really amazing - every day's a new day for eating," she says, smiling. "And when you're connected to nature and what it's producing and looking forward to whatever is ripe and delicious, you feel like it's an endlessly creative nourishing process. I think what's tiresome is when you have a globally available array of foods that aren't either ripe or fresh. You get bored and disinterested." Bad food that has dulled our palates, she believes. We have forgotten how food should taste. And it is not just the bad food, but our way of eating it. "Most kids don't eat with their families, at least not in the US. Some say as many as 85 per cent of kids in the country don't have a meal with their family. So they're inheriting a troubling set of values from the fast food that they're eating, and it's that sort of fast, cheap and easy culture that's changing our world in dramatic ways."
The way to reinvigorate our palates is to "educate the next generation into a set of slow food values". Does that mean she has given up on this generation? "I guess so, I have to say. I think it's very difficult to break the habits, the salt, the sugar, the quantities of food, and especially when people are in a state of obesity or certainly an overweight place. It's much more complex.
"But I do think that if people get to the farmers' market they absorb a lot by osmosis. They don't know why it feels good but it just does and they want to go back. If they eat things, maybe beginning with the easy stuff like fruits and vegetables they never particularly liked, all of a sudden they find them irresistible. So whether you come to this through an environmental point of view or a worry about what's in your food you can end up in the same good place."
But will this slow food message appeal to post-boom Ireland, where the organic label is sometimes just another way of declaring yourself a signed-up member of the comfortable classes? "It's a process. You do have to be engaged in this. It's not something you can kind of call up the maid in your house to prepare and just go and sit down. It's not the same thing. You're investing your time and that's what's rewarding in the end. It's learning how to cook and liking it - wanting to cook."
She is often asked how to cook things quickly, and her response is to tell people to shop well and thoughtfully. "My 10-minute meal would be a piece of chicken or a piece of fish, and I chop up a whole lot of herbs, a little salt, olive oil, and pack this on both sides, and I just cook it in a cast-iron pan till it's all brown. Meanwhile I boil up some new potatoes and I have a salad and I make a vinaigrette that goes over everything. That's 10 minutes. But it's not 10 minutes if I haven't thought about the salad in advance, having found some herbs or grown them in my garden."
She is unusual in the world of restaurant chefs in that she has no formal training. This is a benefit, she believes. "It's really home cooking. It's very, very simple. I wasn't taught that I need to make a sauce béarnaise. I can make a sauce béarnaise, but I don't want to. I couldn't live without herbs. I want rosemary. I like thyme. I like things that are aromatic. I like garlic toast. I always make a chicken broth that I use for the whole week. I take off the breasts and the leg meat and put the chicken in a pot, and I make that right after I come back from the market."
Living the Waters way involves deeper thinking about food and seeing the preparation of dinner not as drudgery to be outsourced to the food processors or the takeaway, but as a pleasurable activity. As rising food prices begin to make headlines, it becomes more than a simple lifestyle choice.
"I think people will have to start to think. I think we're going to really be in a difficult situation if we don't learn how to cook for ourselves, because we're getting such bad news from fast food, and the incomes are shrinking, and we have to find an alternative. I think this is where people will really open up to alternatives."
In the late 1990s she set up a foundation to bring slow food into schools. The Edible Schoolyard project began in Berkeley, through which the growing, preparation and eating of food were incorporated into the school curriculum. Teaching children how to grow and eat food has become a passion. She has not yet met Jamie Oliver, whose school dinners campaign had such a dramatic effect, but she is hoping to meet him soon. They have had long "spiritual" conversations on the phone, and he is a hero of hers.
The schools project is about "the big vision of feeding every child in school, making it an interactive experience for kids, tying the curriculum of history, science and maths to eco-gastronomy, buying food from local sustainable people in season, cooking it simply, and caring about the beauty of the table, because it's a language of care to set the table and gather people to share".
And what about Irish food culture? Are we going down the same unhappy path? "You are, you're just a little behind us," she says. But there is hope in our island status. "I think there's a kind of awareness in a small country that you could really educate the next generation." Her own daughter, Fanny, "loved to eat and she loved to be in the garden". A student of art history in Cambridge, she "cooks wildly and writes about food". When she was small, Alice got her to eat well by handing her a bowl of peas or something equally healthy when she was really hungry, so it didn't matter if she refused to eat her vegetables at dinner later. She also gave her choices as to what vegetables they would prepare and how they would be cooked, drawing on her training as a Montessori teacher. Is she looking forward to the next life stage as a grandmother? "I'm just dying for it, dying for it," she says.
After Fanny was born in 1983, Alice stopped cooking full-time at the restaurant and was delighted to be able to bring her child to work, where Fanny would often sit and play in a bowl of flour. Not surprisingly, Waters always ran her business differently to the long-hours, angry world usually associated with restaurant kitchens. Two chefs, each paid for five days, work three days each and spend the rest of the time with their families. A healthy competition exists between the first half and second half of the week, she says. "It was a great idea and it works beautifully."
Would an edible schoolyard project in this country be teaching Irish children to relearn what their grandparents knew? "It's not too late and it's not just what their grandparents knew, but learning how we can reinvent farming and reinvent cooking so that it's not so limited and difficult as it was back then. We know how to do this now and we just have to learn to do it better."
When she travels she brings her own salad, a separate container of vinaigrette, some cheese, bread, and fresh mint from her garden for tea. If it all sounds like hard work, she does paint a picture of a better world. "I see that people are hungry for meaning in their lives and this is a way to find some. Have dinner with family and friends, get everybody to cook together, get your kids to cook, get them to think of the menu, go shopping, grow things in the garden."
The evening after the interview I sit down with my sons for dinner. My four-year-old asks me whether I know what makes a good work/life balance. "What?" I ask him. "A blackberry," he says, repeating a radio ad he's been listening to.
Then he looks puzzled. "Is there a real fruit called a blackberry?" he asks.
I could weep. Next day his younger brother asks me what my laptop is. "A computer," I say firmly. I will not tell him it's an Apple. Alice Waters wouldn't approve.