The United States of Arugula (22 page)

But it didn’t take long for the erstwhile sorority sisters to acclimate to Berkeley life. Sexually, the new campus was much more to their liking—“Without being outcasts, we didn’t have to get married, and you could move in with your boyfriend, and you had the pill,” says Bertino—and when the Free Speech Movement kicked in during their second semester there, they threw themselves into the cause, if not to the extent of getting arrested and incarcerated. “I loved the sense of community that flowed out of the Free Speech Movement and my little group of friends, and I knew I just wanted to be here,” says Waters, who, apart from a junior year abroad in France and a prolonged overseas trip in 1967–68, has lived in Berkeley ever since.

Waters’s first trip to France, the site of her culinary awakening, came in 1965, the year after her political awakening. “I went to Paris and to Brittany. And that’s really what awakened me in a sensual way to food,” she says. “I hadn’t ever been enthusiastic or excited about food. My mother wasn’t really a good cook; more of a health-food person, always giving us vitamins.” Like Julia Child, Chuck Williams, and Judith Jones before her, Waters was struck that people in France “just
cared
about food—they cared about the buying of it and the cooking of it, no matter whether they ate at home or went to a restaurant. They bought the best bread and went to the farmers’ market two times a day, ’cause they didn’t want the produce that had come in in the morning for the dinner.”

At one particular Breton restaurant, situated in a rustic stone house set by a stream and run by a husband-waiter and cook-wife, Waters experienced
the equivalent of Child’s sole meunière moment in Rouen, watching, blissfully stunned, as her order of trout amandine came to fruition: the husband went out back with a fishing pole, caught a fish, presented it to her in its flopping, gasping state, and then hurried it back to the kitchen, where it soon reemerged as a finished dish, served with vegetables picked from the restaurant’s own garden. For the husband and wife, it was all in a day’s work; for Waters, it was the birth of an idée fixe: seasonal, local ingredients served in the freshest state possible.

Not that she could return to Berkeley and implement this idea instantly; she was still a student with a few semesters to go. In 1966, while she continued her studies, she volunteered to work on the congressional campaign of Robert Scheer, one of the editors
of Ramparts
, the leading magazine of the New Left.
*
Scheer’s campaign quickly ran aground, but not before it provided the opportunity for Waters to meet Goines. Since getting suspended from school, Goines had found happy employment at the Berkeley Free Press—the print shop where Scheer’s campaign posters were being produced—and was developing a side career as a graphic artist. Goines was immediately smitten with the delicately pretty little Scheer volunteer who regularly showed up at the print shop with the campaign’s poster artwork. In those pre-bandanna, pre-beret days, Waters wore her hair in an adorable Mary Tyler Moore flip and looked, says Bertino, like a “pre-Raphaelite angel.” Not long after they met, Waters and Goines moved in together in an apartment on the corner of Grove Street (now Martin Luther King Jr. Way) and Francisco Street, not far from the UC-Berkeley campus. When Goines returned to prison in June of 1967 to serve out the remainder of his sentence, Waters visited him faithfully every weekend, and was there, in a borrowed car, to retrieve him upon his release.

The Goines-Waters apartment became something of a salon for FSM veterans, all of whom were impressed by Waters’s cooking, as unpracticed as
it was at the time. “I remember one time very distinctly that Alice made a béarnaise—which I, of course, had never heard of before—and the egg yolks curdled,” says Goines. “And I was all for trying to save it and fix it. You know, because ‘God! This is, like, real expensive!’ And she just threw it away and started over again. I was real impressed by that. We certainly weren’t a Stalinist cell, eating wretched food.”

“At one dinner we had snails, and the dessert was chocolate mousse,” says Bertino. “And David said, ‘I hope you realize there’s more protein in this chocolate mousse than the average Vietnamese gets in a week.’ I just thought, ‘God, how annoying, David! Just shut up and eat!’”

It
was
kind of an issue, how food fit into the revolution that the young left was fomenting. Waters was decidedly a sensualist and flavorist who had no truck with the puritanical types who saw nobility in deprivation or junky, pseudo-proletarian dietary choices. The yippie leader Jerry Rubin ran with the FSM crowd but insisted on eating bologna-and-white-bread sandwiches because that, allegedly, was what the masses, the
real
cogs of the revolution, ate. This sort of attitude exasperated Waters. “As Alice used to put it, Just because you’re a revolutionary doesn’t mean your idea of a good meal should be Chef Boyardee ravioli reheated in a dog dish,’” says Tom Luddy, another UC-Berkeley grad and member of the FSM circle, who ran the local art-house movie theater, the Telegraph Repertory Cinema. (During the marathon Sproul Hall sit-in, Luddy kept the troops entertained by carting in a projector and screening silent Charlie Chaplin shorts on a wall.) “Alice was the only one who kept insisting that the way we eat is political,” says Luddy. “She would berate everyone in the movement, saying, ‘It’s not enough to liberate yourself politically, to liberate yourself sexually—you have to liberate
all
the senses.’ She believed that eating together was a socially progressive act, one that was under threat from the fifties American-TV, frozen-food culture.” This jibed with Waters’s experiences in France, where she discovered that even impoverished students and intellectuals placed a premium on eating well, and devoted as much argumentative fervor to a discussion of what was for dinner that night as they did to the merits of bolshevism.

Yet Waters, for all her later advocacy of organic farming and healthy
eating, was not aligned with the burgeoning mung-beans-and-tofu “natural foods” movement, either. Having grown up in a brown-rice household—where her mother equated drably prepared whole grains with healthfulness—the ascetic, deflavorized rabbit-food diet was, she says, “what I was trying to escape from.”

Nevertheless, the Bay Area was crawling with young radicals who, like Waters, were reconsidering their relationship with food and, in so doing, were taking an increasing interest in health-food authorities they’d earlier ignored or dismissed as old crackpots—people like the lichen-munching naturalist Euell Gibbons, whose 1962 book,
Stalking the Wild Asparagus
, acquired new chic, and the magazine publisher Jerome Irving (J.I.) Rodale, who was the first person to use the term “organic” in an agricultural context, and whose quarter-century-old publication
Organic Farming and Gardening
suddenly enjoyed a huge spike in readership. As the author Warren Belasco notes in his wry, masterful work of culinary anthropology,
Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took on the Food Industry
, “White versus brown was a central contrast. White meant Wonder Bread, White Tower, Cool Whip, Minute Rice, instant mashed potatoes, peeled apples, White Tornadoes, white coats, white collar, whitewash, White House, white racism. Brown meant whole-wheat bread, unhulled rice, turbinado sugar, wildflower honey, unsulfured molasses, soy sauce, peasant yams, ‘black is beautiful.’”

The young progenitors of the countercuisine, as Belasco calls it, saw food as a means to circumvent the military-industrial establishment and build an alternative system of nourishing the masses, mentally as well as physically. Across the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, where the Haight-Ashbury hippie scene was unfolding, an activist group known as the Diggers was attracting notice for its “feeds,” in which its members distributed free food—much of it scavenged from restaurants and bakeries, or stolen—to the scraggly youths who swarmed the streets. But before they got their free grub, the kids were subjected to Digger harangues about the evils of industrialization and forced to accept mimeographed Digger literature. (The Diggers began as an outgrowth
of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, an avant-garde guerrilla theater group that performed satirical plays and took their name from a seventeenth-century band of English antipoverty activists who planted vegetable crops in town commons and distributed the yield to the poor.) The Diggers advocated not only free food for all but, as one of their manifestoes put it, a “return to the land … to straighten our heads in a natural environment, to straighten our bodies with healthier foods and Pan’s work, toe to toe with the physical world.” To that end, a bunch of them convinced Lou Gottlieb, a former member of the folksinging group the Limeliters, to let them use his Sonoma County ranch as a farm-commune-ashram, which, predictably, degenerated within a year’s time into a messy, chaotic refugee camp for zonkedout Haight hard cases.

Waters and Goines were not unsympathetic to a lot of the countercuisine notions that were in circulation at the time—the need for alternative food sources, the establishment of farming collectives, the virtues of little ethnic groceries vis-à-vis the evils of supermarkets—nor were they fans of processed food (though Bertino remembers her roommate, pre-France, merrily eating Wonder Bread in riposte to her mother’s doctrinaire brown-breadism). But they were too pragmatic to go in for the phoofy “Pan’s work” utopianism and agitprop histrionics of the San Franciscans. As their writer friend Greil Marcus, who graduated from UC-Berkeley the same year as Waters, sums up the Berkeley–San Francisco attitudinal divide, “We were thinkers; they were crazy.”

Berkeley was developing its own, more accessible brand of culinary nonconformity, assaulting the “white food” status quo from a more cerebral, European angle by offering high-quality “gourmet” goods to the university community, which was full of worldly, educated people who had traveled abroad or actually were from abroad—the West Coast equivalents of the people with whom Julia and Paul Child circulated in Cambridge. In 1966, a cantankerous Dutchman named Alfred Peet opened a shop right near Waters and Goines’s apartment, on the corner of Walnut and Vine Streets, called Peet’s Coffee & Tea. Mr. Peet, as he was universally known, had grown up
in the coffee business in Holland and worked as a tea trader in the East Indies, and proselytized to his clientele on the importance of using high-quality arabica beans rather than the cheaper, lower-grade robusta beans used by commercial producers like Folgers and Maxwell House. He quickly developed a loyal following among students and locals, who became addicted to his strong, deep-roasted, intensely flavorful coffee and carefully followed his precepts for re-creating his potent brew at home. (Goines remembers he and all his friends buying hourglass-shaped Chemex filter coffeemakers from Peet, who, with characteristic severity, insisted that his coffee
never
be percolated.) Among Peet’s most devoted early converts was a recent University of San Francisco graduate named Jerry Baldwin, who, even after he moved to Seattle, ordered sacks of Peet’s Coffee by mail so he could get his daily fix. In 1971, with Peet acting as their supplier and roaster, Baldwin and two of his Seattle buddies, Zev Siegl and Gordon Bowker, made a go of it with their own coffee company, Starbucks.

A year after Peet’s opened, Sahag and Elizabeth Avedisian, a middle-aged couple who had met on an Israeli kibbutz, opened a shop a little farther up Vine Street called the Cheese Board. Well ahead of their time, the Avedisians offered a wide array of imported cheeses that were then hard to find, things like chèvre and Gruyère, and plied shoppers with free samples. Unlike Peet, who behaviorally remained true to the Old World, the Avedisians let their hair down and embraced Berkeley radicalism, transforming their privately owned shop into a worker’s collective where every employee was an owner and earned the same wage. The Cheese Board collective was a monster success from the outset, proving that the countercuisine didn’t have to be, by definition, budget-priced, low-cal, or ascetic.
*
The Cheese Board served as a model for all manner of collectives and cooperative groceries that popped up in the Bay Area in the late sixties and early seventies, though
none would match its success and longevity, which, in a capitalism-wary town like Berkeley, caused some resentment and suspicion; as late as 1980, one disgruntled hard-liner took the Cheese Board to task in a letter to the
Bay Area Directory of Collectives
for “selling cheese to an endless stream of customers.”

To Waters, the most important gourmet shop to open in Berkeley in this period was the Kitchen, on Channing Street, which was not a food store but a specialty kitchenwares shop, a sort of small-scale version of San Francisco’s Williams-Sonoma. The Kitchen’s owner, a faculty wife named Gene Opton, took pride in offering an eclectic array of cookbooks in addition to her impressive line of wire whisks, Scandinavian cheese planes, and T. G. Green mixing bowls imported from England. It was she who importuned Waters, one of her regulars, to check out the works of Elizabeth David, a star of English cookery who was then little known in America outside of food-establishment circles. (The hard-to-please Michael Field was a fan.)

David, like Waters, had felt no particular affinity for food until she went to France as a student—in her case in 1929, when, at sixteen, she was sent by her father, a Conservative member of the British Parliament, to spend a year at the Sorbonne in Paris, where she discovered that there was more to eating than the “nursery tapioca” and “appalling boiled cod” she’d experienced at home. David later traveled extensively, to India, Egypt, the Greek Islands, Italy, and throughout provincial France, picking up recipes and techniques along the way. In the 1950s, as British food was at its most postwar-scarce and monochromatic, she wrote a series of books on French and Italian country cooking that enchanted English readers with sun-dappled visions of “unknown cafés along the banks of the Burgundy canal, patronized by men who sail the great petrol and timber barges to and from Marseille” (from
French Country Cooking
, 1951) and farmers’ markets brimming with “bunches of gaudy gold marrow-flowers [that] show off the elegance of pink and white marbled bean pods, primrose potatoes, green plums, green peas” (from
Italian Food
, 1954).