Alice Waters - We Are What We Eat: A Slow Food Manifesto

Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook

Fanny in France: Travel Adventures of a Chefs Daughter, with Recipes

My Pantry: Homemade Ingredients That Make Simple Meals Your Own (with Fanny Singer)

The Art of Simple Food II: Recipes, Flavor, and Inspiration from the New Kitchen Garden

40 Years of Chez Panisse: The Power of Gathering

In the Green Kitchen: Techniques to Learn by Heart

Edible Schoolyard: A Universal Idea

The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution

Chez Panisse Fruit

Chez Panisse Caf Cookbook

Chez Panisse Vegetables

Chez Panisse Pasta, Pizza & Calzone

Fanny at Chez Panisse: A Childs Restaurant Adventures with 46 Recipes

Chez Panisse Cooking

Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook

I didnt fully understand the power of food when I opened Chez Panisse in 1971. I knew back then that there was definitely a connection between the counterculture I was part of and the food politics of the day, but the relationship between those two things hadnt yet coalesced in my mind. I respected the back-to-the-land movement and how it emphasized growing your own food without chemicals or pesticides; we had all read Rachel Carsons Silent Spring and, later, Frances Moore Lapps book Diet for a Small Planet. When I was a student at UC Berkeley, the Free Speech Movement and anti-war and civil rights movements were going on around me in the streets. And I lived through Csar Chvezs grape strike and watched how effective it was at focusing peoples attention on the rights of the farmworkers who grow our food. Those politics were all part of mehow could they not be? These were the biggest issues of our time. But that wasnt why I opened the restaurant. I opened Chez Panisse because feeding people good food felt like the only hopeful thing I could do.

Things began to change for me a few years later when, looking for taste, we ended up at the doorstep of the organic farmers, ranchers, and suppliers. Because they chose the best heritage varieties and picked them when they were absolutely ripe, the local, sustainable farmers and gardeners were always the ones who grew the best-tasting ingredients. We started putting those growers and suppliers names on the menus in order to give a public face to the generally invisible network of agriculture behind the restaurant. Suddenly, people began looking forward to Jim Churchills Ojai Kishu mandarins around the New Year or Mas Masumotos Central Valley Suncrest peaches at the end of August. They would recognize them. And ask for them. Our customers started experiencing, through their taste buds, the natural differences that geography and seasonal fluctuations made in the agricultural environment around them. We were all learning about terroir and biodiversity through the food at the restaurant. Not only that, the word got around that we were willing to pay farmers directly for their beautiful produce, without a middlemanand that we were willing to pay them the true cost of their food. This gave farmers and ranchers more financial securityand ultimately created an alternative economy for Chez Panisse.

Increasingly, this awareness about food was growing in other pockets around the country. There were more and more restaurants discovering and using local, organic ingredients. There were farmers markets popping up in communities in every statemarkets where customers could get to know the people growing their food. Directly supporting the farmers who came to those marketplaces seemed to meand many otherslike the best way to participate in and encourage this emerging farm-to-table movement.

In 1988, I was introduced to Carlo Petrini, the creator of a new grassroots political and educational organization in Italy called Slow Food International. Carlo wasstill isan amazing philosopher and extraordinary visionary, and he has a passion for global food activism built on traditional ways of life. When Carlo spoke, his metaphors illuminated the complex issues of biodiversity and sustainability by connecting them to taste and the pleasures of the table. His big ideas electrified me and validated my own reasons for starting Chez Panisse. For example, Slow Food International was creating an Ark of Taste, which collects and safeguards traditional foods from all cultures that are at risk of extinction. I became deeply involved in and committed to Carlos movement. Through Slow Food I met food activists from all over the world: farmers from Ethiopia, cheesemakers from Ghana, seed savers from Nepal, rice growers from Japanevery one committed to preserving tradition and taste in the face of the fast food industry on the rise everywhere. These relationships expanded my understanding of the global issues facing all of us. I was fascinatedbut also shockedto realize that there were people all over the planet coming to terms with the same issues we were grappling with in the United States. I felt the possibility and potential of being part of a global food movement. That slogan from the 1970s immediately came to mind: Think globally, act locally.

But back in Berkeley, Id drive five miles outside the city limits and still see fast food restaurants and industrial development spreading across the landscapeusually an agricultural landscapelike a cancer. I kept thinking, What good is what were doing at Chez Panisse and other places if its not making a deeper impact, if its not penetrating the culture at large?