Happy Birthday Alice Waters – Food Activist
April Foodie Birthdays Include Alice B. Toklas and Brillat-Savarin
Apr 12, 2009
The foodie profile for April is on Alice Waters, most famous for her Chez Panisse restaurant.
Alice Waters was born April 28, 1944 in Chatham, New Jersey. She attended University of California at Berkeley in the tumultuous late '60s, graduating in 1967 with a degree in French cultural studies. During her college years, she was involved with local politics, working for an unsuccessful congressional campaign.
A Revolutionary Year in France
At age 19 Waters spent a year traveling in France. "I lived at the bottom of a market street, and I took everything in by osmosis," she once told the New York Times. "This was my first connection with farmers' markets and real food. I loved what I ate and I wanted that kind of food here."
When Waters returned to the United States, she got a job teaching. At night, she would cook for friends. "Chez Panisse began as an offshoot of dinner parties," says David Goines, a friend since college days and the designer/illustrator of two of her cookbooks. "Alice wanted to have her friends to dinner every night. The only way to do that was to open a restaurant."
Chez Panisse Beginnings
In 1971, Alice borrowed $10,000 -- her father mortgaged his house -- and with her friend Lindsey Shere opened a bistro in an old house on Shattuck Street, near the Berkeley campus. They served a single prix-fixe menu that changed daily. The set menu format enables Water's philosophy of serving only the highest quality products, only when they are in season.
The core of friends who cooked and ate at Chez Panisse in those early days were trying to reinvent the world, not launch a posh restaurant to get rich. None of them had culinary training. “I think there was one guy who had waited on tables in Austria,” Waters recalls. According to Goines, "There was a joyful abandon in creating a completely inedible meal. There were several memorable disasters. That was part of the experimentation." But the restaurant didn't make money. For years Chez Panisse lost a small fortune. Even today the restaurant reportedly earns little profit.
Read more on Alice Waters’ as locavore, slow food promoter and a list of her cookbooks, also more on her influence on the Obama White House.
Other Foodies Born in April
April 1, 1755 -- Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, French politician and author of the 8-volume Physiologie du goût, ou Méditation de gastronomie transcendante, ouvrage théorique, historique et à l'ordre du jour ("The Physiology of Taste, or Meditation on Transcendent Gastronomy, a Work Theoretical, Historical, and Programmed") published in 1825. It treats dining as an art form and contains many delightful and witty observations on the pleasures of the table.
April 30, 1907 Alice B. Toklas The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, first published in 1954, is one of the great works of recollection, culinary and otherwise. With her companion, Gertrude Stein, Toklas lived, cooked, and kept house in Paris and summers in rural Biligin, France from 1908 until Stein's death in 1947. In the cookbook, Toklas shares not only the recipes she accumulated, but memories of the wide bohemian circle she and Stein hosted, including Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and Thornton Wilder.
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