The United States of Arugula (54 page)

IN THE 1990S AND EARLY YEARS OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, THE DEBATE OVER
whether Alice Waters had “restaurant chops” and really cooked at Chez Panisse became moot. She shifted into full-time advocate mode, preaching the virtues of sustainable agriculture, farm-to-table connectivity, local foods, and early education about “real” foods vis-à-vis junk foods. The origins of this shift date back to 1983, the year Waters gave birth to her only child, Fanny, the product of a brief marriage to Stephen Singer, a wine and olive oil importer. Jerry Budrick, Chez Panisse’s longtime headwaiter, says that Fanny was just one of seven babies born to the Chez Panisse staff that year
(including one of his own), and that the restaurant suddenly “became a lot more serious, with less, let’s say, recreational intoxication.”

As Waters and her colleagues raised their children and experienced firsthand the inbuilt threats of processed, commercial foods and the Mephistophelean seductiveness of Double Meat Whoppers and Cool Ranch Doritos, the great lady of Chez Panisse decided to take action. In 1994, she started the Edible Schoolyard program at the Martin Luther King Junior Middle School in Berkeley, planting a one-acre organic garden in a former parking lot next to the school, so that its students, mostly from lower-income families, could help grow their own food and “transform school lunch into a vibrant expression of education for sustainability,” as the program’s mission statement puts it.

Some years later, after Fanny Singer had entered Yale, Waters helped instigate the Yale Sustainable Food Project at the university’s aptly named Berkeley College, in which students cultivated their own one-acre garden, produce was purchased from local organic farmers, a composting program was established, a chef was brought in to devise seasonal menus, and the first-ever “Sustainable Tailgate” was held at the 2003 Harvard-Yale football game, featuring “Wolfe’s Neck Farm grass-fed burgers”—a marked contrast from the collegiate norm of celebrating one’s liberation from parental supervision by subsisting entirely on Hostess cakes and Skippy peanut butter eaten straight from an industrial-size tub.

Already a celestial figure in Bay Area and foodie circles, Waters has now been beatified within her own lifetime as Saint Alice, with a court of apostles that includes Marion Cunningham, Ruth Reichl, the
San Francisco Chronicle
restaurant critic Michael Bauer, and
The New York Times
veteran newsman turned gastro-tourist-at-large R. W. “Johnny” Apple. On top of that, her gospel has gained global resonance with the advent of the Slow Food movement, which originated in Italy in 1986 when a man named Carlo Petrini led a protest against the opening of a new McDonald’s in Rome. (His followers defiantly held aloft bowls of penne like placards.) Petrini took his movement international in 1989, advocating the preservation
of old and endangered foodways, the importance of local and artisanal food products, the sacredness of the family meal as a social rite, and the need for public awareness of the ecological, social, and nutritional evils wrought by industrial, monocultural agriculture. The Slow Food movement’s local chapters are known as convivia—because “conviviality is one of the most fundamental aspects of eating together,” Petrini explains—and Waters hopped on board early, founding the Berkeley convivium and proclaiming the King School to be a “slow school,” a model for her proposed “revolution in public education—a real Delicious Revolution.”

No one doubts the worthiness of Waters’s goals, especially in a nation where the rates of diabetes and childhood obesity are on the rise, and where municipal governments, desperate for cash, have agreed to such Faustian bargains as Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s 2003 deal to make Snapple the exclusive beverage provider of the New York City public school system. And Waters’s proposal to let kids “start getting credit for school lunch”—incorporating the daily in-school act of eating lunch into the curriculum, teaching kids about the nutritional value and provenance of the food they’re being served—is an inspired idea.

But there are plenty in the food world who admire the message but believe that the messenger lacks the common touch, who feel that Waters is too much of an insulated, ivory-tower dreamer on the one hand and too much of a hardheaded, unyielding dogmatist on the other—“a romantic with a spine of steel,” says Betty Fussell, who describes herself as a “Slow Food person with a lot of skepticism. You know, the search for the little tiny Italian fava-bean grower down the road?
Please!
So much of that is really hyped.”

The problem is that Waters doesn’t realize what more effective celebrity activists, such as Bono, the singer in the band U2, have realized: that politics is about dialogue and compromise, not preaching and obstinacy. Just as the 2004 presidential campaign of the Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich suffered for its tin-eared cluelessness—his spokespeople said his name “rhymes with spinach, and they’re both good for you,” effectively extinguishing Kucinich’s chances right then and there—so does Waters turn
people off with such stock lines as “Give me any kid. In six weeks, they’ll be eating chard.” That sounds more like a threat than a promise of uplift, and it’s characteristic of her sometimes off-key approach, one that takes a fundamentally noble and celebratory premise and turns it into a guilt trip.

“I love Alice, but …” is a common refrain among the stars of the food world, who admire her ideals but question her pragmatism. As in “Don’t get me wrong, I love Alice, but she’s fuckin’ out there,” the words that come from Emeril Lagasse’s lips when it’s put to him that she might not approve of his line of California-grown but nationally distributed green-salad blends sold in plastic containers bearing his photo. (There is also a line of Emeril fresh herbs.) A true subscriber to Waters’s tenets, Lagasse is told, would recoil from buying non-local produce—with a celebrity chef’s mug on it, no less. Waters herself, when asked where an American living in a cold-weather climate is supposed to find salad greens during the winter, says, “I always want to buy from the local small-scale producer who is taking care of the land. During the winter, there are lettuces grown in hoop houses on the East Coast and in the Midwest.”

But Lagasse counters, “I got into this because of my children and the crap that’s in the supermarket. Look, most people don’t live in New York City, where you can just go down the street and get anything you want. Most people have to settle for brown lettuce that’s been up there for a couple of weeks, and it’s sad.”

Working with a commercial grower in northern California called Pride of San Juan, Lagasse claims he’s “doing farming two levels above organic. We have this guy that we hired who wrote the laws for the United States government for the FDA on produce, and we hired him to take those standards, and, as I say, kick it up a notch, so that nobody has the standards that we have. We basically have the fields computerized, where we know, based on the weather, the best time that we should pick what lettuce, when we should pick it, what temperature it should be. The lettuces are not gassed. It’s totally natural. No chemicals.”

Tom Colicchio takes pains to say, “Alice and I have a good relationship,”
but recalls participating in a panel discussion in which Waters was “going on and on about organic this and local that. I said, ‘Alice, I use it whenever I can, but I don’t believe that I have to use local ingredients if I can get something flown in from Australia that is great.’ And she said, ‘Well, if you know how much fuel it takes to fly that in …’ I said, ‘Alice—they’re not putting one lobster on a plane just for me!’ So then she starts telling us about this wonderful pig that she found up in Oregon. I said, ‘Alice, what did you just say? You’re in California—how do you consider that local?’ She just looked at me and said, ‘You’re right. I have to stop using that.’ I said, ‘Why?!
Why?!
You’re supporting this farmer who’s doing this wonderful thing up in Oregon! Why do you have to not support this person anymore?’ It’s
insane!”

Rick Bayless had a much more fraught encounter with Waters after he appeared in a Burger King commercial in 2003, endorsing the fast-food chain’s low-calorie Santa Fe Fire-Grilled Chicken Baguette Sandwich, a piece of chicken breast served on a baguette and topped with grilled peppers and onions and a spicy sauce. Bayless says he knew that getting into bed with Burger King was a fraught proposition, but, upon receiving the offer from the company, he thought, “I don’t come from the school that says, ‘We should just turn our back on the evil giants.’ I think we should just get right in the middle of the evil giants’ companies and say, ‘Hey, you know what? If you take this step, it’ll be a good step.’ If I can get several hundred thousand people to not eat Whoppers and eat something that’s healthier—that’s got a brighter, less-processed flavor—then, you know, that’s actually a good thing.” The money he received for the commercial, Bayless asserts, went straight to his Frontera Farmer Foundation, which distributes money to family farms in the Chicago orbit in the form of capital improvement grants.

Still, for all his forethought, Bayless was unprepared for the kerfuffle his commercial caused. It was a food-world
scandale
, with other chefs wondering if he really pocketed the money for himself, and the chat rooms of eGullet, an online society for hardcore foodies, burbling with indignation. “What is he thinking???” wrote one eGullet member. “What’s next, Alice Waters doing a Subway commercial with Jared?”

More seriously, there were reasoned critiques that cast Bayless as either naïve or cynical for promoting a sandwich that was not all-natural, and whose sauce contained high fructose corn syrup, a sneaky ingredient in many processed foods that helps foster obesity. (On this count, Lagasse, who ought to know better, also has a lot to answer for. His Emeril’s Original marinades, sauces, and salad dressings, manufactured by the processed-foods giant B&G Foods, are made with high fructose corn syrup.)

BILL NIMAN AND
his wife, Nicolette Hahn Niman, who know a thing or two about doing business with fast-food companies, were among those mystified by Bayless’s deal with Burger King. Though they sell their pork to the McDonald’s-owned Chipotle chain, and though Bill says he would gladly sell his beef to McDonald’s itself if the company were interested, what Bayless did was, to them, different.

“It’s not that Rick was doing business with the devil—that’s not the issue,” says Nicolette. “It’s distinct from, let’s say, the concept of Niman Ranch selling something to McDonald’s, because Rick was endorsing a product that he was not really involved with. The sauce had corn syrup in it, and that, in itself, is offensive to all the values that he stands for. He was actually going out and—“

“Validating something pretty horrible,” Bill says.
*

Bayless, taken aback by the reaction, used the Frontera Grill Web site to explain, at length, his actions. “Here is my reasoning in a nutshell,” he wrote. “I decided that it’s time for those of us in the healthy food/sustainable food movement to applaud any positive steps we see in the behemoth quick-service restaurant chains. Seventy-five percent of our fellow Americans nourish themselves in their restaurants at least once a week (an even more serious
statistic is that almost 20 percent eat fast food three or more times a week). I can no longer ignore these statistics, and I ask you not to, either.”

Bayless believes that, in the end, the controversy was a boon to his food activism, “because it gave me an opportunity to really explain what I was doing, and why I was doing it. People who never listened to me before on the subject of health were suddenly listening to me and going, ‘Oh, I guess you’ve got a point there.’ That was great. And now I’m working with the CEO of Burger King about the possibility of the next step, that being an all-natural sandwich, with no preservatives. And he’s talking about starting to use organic ingredients in some of the sauces and stuff. How could I have ever gotten that ear if I hadn’t gone down that road?”

Whether or not you believe Bayless is sincere—and there have been murmurings that what he’s offered is more a rationalization than an explanation—his central point is valid: that the big companies need to be engaged, not excommunicated, if there is to be further progress in America’s food revolution. The corporations are not going to fold up and go away. It’s Waters’s right not to branch out and become a commercial behemoth herself—she has spurned all offers to turn Chez Panisse into a brand, and has opened only one other establishment, a teeny-tiny breakfast spot in a Berkeley strip mall called Café Fanny—but other figures in the food firmament resent how she sits in judgment of their commercial activities.