Conscious Choice: Alice and Deborah Do Lunch

March 2005

Alice and Deborah Do Lunch

Two food activists, filmmaker Deborah Koons Garcia and Alice Waters, founder of Chez Panisse discuss Edible Schoolyards, the obesity crisis, organic farming and GMOs.

by Paul Shalmy

Last November Alice Waters, founder of Berkeley’s Chez Panisse, introduced a special screening of Deborah Koons Garcia’s documentary The Future of Food before a full house at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco in a benefit for Slow Food U.S.A. That memorable evening gave us the notion of bringing these two food activists extraordinaire together for a conversation.

In a PBS American Masters program, Alice Waters and Her Delicious Revolution, the New York Times’ R. W. Apple said of her that “there is no more influential person in American food.” Chez Panisse became world famous for its revolutionary insistence on using only the freshest and best organic food from local farms. But, locally, she is equally renowned for starting The Edible Schoolyard at Berkeley’s Martin Luther King Middle School. Nine years ago, Waters, an ex-Montessori teacher, saw some unused tarmac in the schoolyard and thought there could be a garden there so the kids could grow food and learn how to cook it.

In The Future of Food, Mill Valley filmmaker Deborah Koons Garcia tells the disturbing story of the introduction of GMO foods by agribusiness. The documentary is fast becoming an underground classic at film festivals and universities, and among environmentalists, food activists and concerned citizens. It is available now at www.thefutureoffood.com and will be sold at Whole Foods Markets this spring. Deborah is also known to her neighbors as the widow of the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia.

Their conversation, excerpted below, took place over lunch at the upstairs caf at Chez Panisse. As culinary guide books counsel, Alice asked the chef for his suggestions. He recommended the fedilini pasta with razor clams, green garlic, and marjoram, which excited Alice; winter couscous with chickpeas, delicata squash, harissa and charmoula which intrigued Deborah; and Sierra mackerel roasted in the wood oven which appealed to me. As we started the conversation, we were aware that Alice had to participate in an important conference call right after lunch about potential federal support for her program.

Alice Waters (AW): When I was in New York recently I spoke with a former Senator who said he could help us get U.S. Department of Agriculture funding to kick-start the School Lunch Initiative. I said, “Well, good, let’s get that right away.” That’s what this conference call is all about. Berkeley Unified School District, the Center for Eco-Literacy, Children’s Hospital, and Chez Panisse Foundation are collaborating to teach school lunch as if it were an academic subject. We are thinking about moving school lunch from the maintenance division and making it a legitimate part of the academic life of every child, K-12, in Berkeley’s 17 public schools. The kids will be involved in the preparation of the food from the garden to the table.

Deborah Koons Garcia (DKG): That’s great. In my trips around the country to show the film I’ve heard about a similar school program in Santa Fe. Apparently the kids love to eat something they’ve grown. Their interest in food changes.

AW: A Harvard professor did a preliminary study that validated a lot of what we’ve done at The Edible Schoolyard for the last nine years. We’re going to evaluate this as we go along. Some money is earmarked for evaluation; some for educating the parent body; and some will make up the shortfall for purchase of food. It will cost more because we want to pay the farmers more. Can you imagine what it will mean to have the buying power to feed 10,000 kids a day? We only feed 500 a day here at the restaurant.

DKG: I showed my film at Commonweal in Bolinas for some people from Health Care Without Harm [See CG December ’04]. There was a woman doctor there who uses a book called Food and Mood that shows how food alters brain chemistry and how you feel. Parents ought to be educated about how eating wholesome as opposed to junk food affects their children’s minds. I think that would motivate parents.

AW: You would think a lot of things. [Laughter.] Parents just don’t have time to eat dinner with their kids. That’s why the schools have to take up the slack, teaching kids that there is something valuable in sitting around the table with their families. It’s all of a piece.

DKG: How far do you think this can go?

AW: I see no limits. Teaching kids to become stewards of the land, to nourish themselves, and to communicate at the table — that’s essential for the future of the human race. It teaches kids a whole set of values. Forty years ago, when we had a physical fitness crisis, we decided to add physical education to the school curriculum. So we built gymnasiums and tracks, and everyone was obliged to take PE. Well, we’re in another crisis, an environmental crisis and a health crisis.

DKG: Childhood obesity has become an enormous problem.

AW: Which is one of the reasons there is so much interest in the program. The obesity crisis is at our back. Children’s Hospital is involved in this program because they have identified 4,000 kids in Berkeley and North Oakland who are at risk for obesity. Their clinic can only take care of 150. So they were looking for ways to be in the public school system. When they heard about this program, they thought it offered them a way. There’s no other program that will reach every single child at an early age. So they want to be a part of this. You know, it’s really about timing, like when I opened Chez Panisse. We have a fantastic moment right now. Despite the results of the election, doors are opening. Everywhere. I’m talking about an emotional opening. People need something hopeful, and what could be more hopeful than this? When you see how deeply the kids are engaged in The Edible Schoolyard, you know it’s as right as rain. This isn’t a Democratic or Republican issue. It’s something everybody can relate to.

DKG: I agree. The food issue unites people.

AW: We all must eat. But many adults have no idea what the consequences are of the [food] choices they make. Corporations have made a deliberate attempt to obfuscate what’s at stake. They don’t want you to know where your food comes from. So, the more we educate the public to the path you go down in your film, the more awakened we are and shocked by it. Everybody is going to be shocked by it. If you saw a slaughterhouse, you wouldn’t want to buy beef anymore.

DKG: I don’t eat beef anyway.

AW: The beautiful thing is what you showed at the end of your film. It’s a huge pleasure to know the people who grow your food, to meet them at a farmer’s market and buy from them. Community is about connecting with people in a regular way. You are supporting them with your purchases, and they are enriching your life with delicious food.

DKG: And it’s a healthy pleasure. Unhealthy consumerism, more and more junk, does not satisfy people. I hope we’re in the middle of a shift where people can get back to what is pleasurable, what sustains us rather than drains us.

AW: That’s why we have to go into the school system and teach kids in an academic way about the consequences of the decisions they make. We have to educate them in what I hope will be a delicious way.

DKG: Will all the food be organic?

AW: We are organizing the lunch program so that what we serve the kids is consistent with what we are teaching them in the classroom. We want to support the farmers who are taking care of the land for the future. I can’t imagine not having as our goal serving 100 percent sustainable food.

DKG: I showed the film a few nights ago at Google. The two guys who started the company hired a wonderful chef a few years ago when only 50 people worked there. Now he serves 4,000 meals a day. He serves as much organic food as possible, local produce, grass-fed beef. Employees can eat breakfast, lunch and dinner free. They showed the film in the dining room with all these people eating and watching. The food was delicious. If kids are served that kind of food every day, they’ll taste it and feel better. The key is to get them into it long enough so they experience the changes and appreciate the difference.

AW: That’s the goal: To bring them into it without telling them “Don’t eat this, don’t eat that” — bringing them into an entirely different relationship to food, one that has to do with a ritual at the table, with a really deep understanding of what’s on their plate, and that does it in a delicious way.

DKG: For some progressives and activists, there is this notion of pleasure being forbidden fruit. Why not have it all? As we go forward, let’s protest and have a great meal.

AW: Exactly right. In America there’s work and there’s pleasure and they’re a million miles apart. The Edible Schoolyard project succeeded in bringing them together, so that the kids experience the pleasure of work as a value. It’s not drudgery for these kids to be in the kitchen or to wash dishes. They stay after class to wash dishes because they’re having fun. I love to do that at the end of a meal. All my friends hang out, we wash the dishes, play music, and it gets done in no time.

DKG: I love that idea. When I was in school we had a cook. In the eleventh grade they brought in a food service. The quality changed from someone who cared about the meal to the impersonal ship-it-in, heat-it-up, and plop-it-on-our-plates.

AW: Kids do notice that. Food is about care. Yes, kids are hungry, but not only for food. They’re just as hungry for people to care about them. To see the worst kind of processed food come into school kitchens day after day makes you want to cry. How can you think about feeding this to a child? It’s really wrong. I’ve been able to mobilize a lot of support because of the relationships I’ve forged thanks to Chez Panisse. But I think that a lot of people connect the restaurant with a kind of food elitism. I want to demystify that assumption and show the public schools that we can make affordable, delicious, wholesome food. It’s the subject of this new book I’m going to write. People have to realize -— and it’s an important message — we need to pay more for food. We need to pay the farmers well. It’s unacceptable the amount of money that they make for doing the hard work and bringing us the bounty of their labor and knowledge, this beautiful nourishing food.

DKG: Farmers need to make a living wage.

AW: They should make more than just a living wage. They are heroes.

DKG: I mean a healthy living wage. As opposed to having certain crops subsidized so that they end up growing tons of corn, soy, and all those things that get fed to animals while food for people becomes a kind of kibble. A lot of these corporations want us all to eat kibble. [Laughter]

AW: That would be fine with them.

DKG: Bio-engineered kibble. When I decided to make this film, I thought it would be about pesticides. But a friend who’s an organic farmer told me that the big story now is that they genetically engineer seeds so that you can spray herbicides on the plants and the plants don’t die. When I started researching the film, I learned that Monsanto was genetically engineering seeds with bacteria that made the plants resistant to Monsanto’s Roundup, the best-selling herbicide in the world. Instead of spraying once before planting to kill the weeds, they spray over and over again.

AW: They just can’t leave well enough alone.

DKG: When you do that, even though Roundup is less toxic than some other chemicals, you basically turn soil into dirt. You wipe out the micro-organisms that make it soil, that breathe life into it. Then I found out Monsanto was buying up seed companies, patenting seeds and suing farmers who used their own seeds but whose crops had been inadvertently contaminated by pollen drift from Roundup Ready crops. They sue farmers who’ve just been minding their own business for “patent infringement.”

AW: They’ll go to any lengths to make money, won’t they?

DKG: I wanted to make a film that’s a cross between Silent Spring and Battle of Algiers, a film that makes you want to do something. A lot of the people who’ve seen it end up going through their cupboards, reading labels, and throwing stuff out. The film shows how the world is closing in on us. My generation could drop out and do our own thing, but in the age of bio-technology, a person can’t say, “You do your thing and I’ll do mine,” because your thing will blow over and contaminate my thing and I won’t even know it unless I get my crops tested.

AW: And then they have the gall to foist that stuff on unsuspecting consumers and their children without ever having to prove its safety or even label it.

DKG: Which has created a big conflict with foreign countries that don’t want genetically engineered foods. I think we’re living in the era of the Takeover Bully. Are we really a people who believe in democracy and equality of opportunity, as I was taught, or are we just on a giant power trip? In bio-engineered agriculture, the seeds and pollen themselves become Takeover Bullies. They are more aggressive than other plants. We need to fight against this, because once bullies take over it’s hard to get rid of them. We’re at a crossroads. That’s why The Edible Schoolyard, your school lunch initiative and all food activism are so important.

Paul Shalmy is a Berkeley-based freelance writer.

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