673: That Time Alice Waters Went Canoeing With RFK Jr.

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0:31About 30 years, I went on a canoe trip with him up the Hudson River. And he pointed out every place where sewage was coming into the Hudson. And he knew the names of all the fish that were being poisoned. And I was astonished. This is Taste. I'm your host, Matt Rodbard. This one has been a long time coming. The one and only Alice Waters joins me in the studio for an amazing conversation. We talk naturally about her legacy at Chez Panisse, the pioneering restaurant in Berkeley, California that opened in 1971 with California farmers front and center. There would be no farm-to-table movement without Alice.

1:20We also talk about her work bringing regenerative farming to school kitchens and her new book, A School Lunch Revolution. It was a thrill having Alice in the studio, and I hope you enjoy this conversation.

1:36Alice Waters, welcome to This Is Taste. Great to see you. Thank you so much. We met last weekend, like for the first time face-to-face in Los Angeles. We were at a chef conference, and I got to meet you. You were so—you gave me a hug. Are you like that with everybody, or should I feel special? You are special, but I do love to have that close connection. I love to hug people. It's a wonderful trait. It's a wonderful trait. And before we get to a school lunch revolution and some talk about Chez Panisse, 54 years, It's been open. So much to talk about. You're here in New York. When you visit New York, where do you like to dine out?

2:23Oh, that's very hard to say. I always have been down there in the village. And I know so many people in the restaurant business. It's always a little hard to know where I'm going to go. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you probably have, it's probably a political choice to where to go that one time. Well, it's not so much that. It's kind of a friend's choice. I have really good friends in the restaurant business down there. And who do I visit first? Well, I'm so happy you're here. Before we get to the book, you know, 54 years running a restaurant, that's a long time. I mean, what excites you about showing up for work in the morning at Chez Panisse?

3:09I have to say I have never tired of showing up to work. I love being there. I mean, it was much harder in the beginning because I was in the kitchen and dining room, and I was always worried about whether people were having a good time and all of that. But I love the unpredictability of it, that you're not sure how the food's going to be. I mean, you're changing lettuce because of the season. But, you know, I just want to stick my hand in and try it. Yeah. I mean, touching the produce and just seeing what comes in off the trucks every morning. You're still there looking at it. Oh, I am. But I think you know that we know everybody who brings us food.

4:03And the main person is now Bob Kennard's son, Ross, who just has been the greatest for Chez Panisse because he calls up the chefs in the morning. And he says, will you take these nettles today? And, of course, the cooks say yes. And it's really great because he picks up all the compostable materials from the restaurant and takes them back up and brings us the good stuff. I've always wanted to ask you this question. You know, you were the first in America to put a farmer's name on a menu. And what was it deep down inside of you that inspired that decision that, I mean, there would be no farm to table without Chez Panisse?

4:55Well, there would be no Shibonese without the farmers. And so I felt like they were the main people that should be on the menu so that other people could know about them. You know, somebody like Mas Masamoto, I keep talking about him always because he's the greatest peach farmer. And we only have his peaches that little short period of time in the fall. But he's somebody who really knows how to speak about regenerative organic agriculture and what it means to his farm. And he, you know, is such a good friend. I would pay anything for his peaches. Yeah, yeah. I mean, when you put these farmers and you list these heirloom products on your menu, what's the diner in the early 70s thinking when they enter the restaurant?

5:59Well, I'm sure you've heard the story about Jose Andres. He came to the restaurant, and I brought him a little plate that had the best figs ever on it. And he took a look, and he said, what is this? You know, just like this is dessert. And then he tasted one, and he's never had anything like that in his life. And that's the experience that I want people to have. And so we talk about those farmers because they're so precious. And their choices of what to grow has gone all over the Bay Area. You know, there's some farmers markets everywhere now. Absolutely revolutionary that you made this choice and we are all for the better for it.

6:58I appreciate it, Alice. It didn't come from me. It came from France, because I went to France when I was 19, as you probably know, and I ate food there that completely blew my mind. And I said, I want to live like the French when I got back. And that was the reason I started the restaurant. I thought, well, France, I could feel like I was in France. It was the idea of eating completely seasonally, of knowing the biodiversity of the food at that particular moment in time. and, you know, getting, changing the menus accordingly. And that's what I did when I came back. It wasn't anything that I dreamed up.

8:01It's the way people have been eating since the beginning of time. Yeah, you're very humble. And I think the sentiment is echoed by Michael McCarty, who was doing something similar down in Los Angeles. We've had many conversations with him. And the work you and Michael did in California in the 70s, It just cannot be understated on this show how important it is. Well, it's probably—I mean, it was very, very important, I know. But it wasn't anything revolutionary in the world. Yeah. And people should know that when I say we need to go back there, it's the way people have lived since the beginning of time.

8:47Eating what is locally available, eating what the seasons require, knowing your farmer. And it's something beautiful. Last Chez Panisse question before we get to the book and what you just said about, you know, eating seasonally obviously makes sense in the school system. I have to ask you about the alumni. We've had many alumni on the show. And give me a story of maybe an alumni who we don't know as well. Somebody who's doing something interesting in the world. Always the person that comes back to me is Steve Sullivan. Because he was a busboy at Chez Ben-East when we first opened downstairs. And he heard me complaining about bread.

9:39And he said, you know, if I make some French bread for you, will you let me do it for the restaurant? And he was a student at Cal Berkeley. And he had a stove in his accommodations. And so he learned about making bagasse from reading about France. And one day he brought some down and I said, okay, you can make bread. This is your job now. This is my guy. And he drove us crazy because he was spraying in ovens coming at 7 o 'clock and 6 o 'clock in the morning. And I said, could you please find some place you can make the bread? And because you're driving us crazy. So he opened Acme Bread Company in Berkeley and changed bread in this country.

10:45But he studied what a baguette was in these books. He went to France ultimately. And he started really making loaves that people stood in line for just the way they do in France. Love that story. And I'm so excited. The other day, I just went to see him because he's opened up a bigger bakery across the street. Oh, okay. And it is going to be so beautiful. I cannot wait to visit, the new one. With an open kitchen and little places where you can stand and watch in the kitchen. Oh, that's wonderful. And, I mean, he's always been that way of sharing all his baking with bakers in San Francisco and New York, all around the country.

11:34He doesn't feel proprietary ever. And I love that about him. I love that about the baking world, how it's open source in many ways. And I think you shouldn't be proprietary for that technique and for that baking tradition. Or for anything I'm not proprietary. Fair. Just come on in the kitchen. It should be open source. If you can do it better than I can, I'll come and eat at your restaurant. On to the book. You know, the idea of tying together these two critical aspects tied to our future world, regenerative agriculture and school lunches. Alice, it just it makes too much sense. It makes too much sense.

12:12First question is, is why isn't it as common in school systems as it should be? Well, there are a lot of reasons. One is that we have people that are trying to make money on the distribution of food in schools. And they're importing food, and they're buying food that is not necessarily good for you at all. and I'm talking about buying food for schools the way that they've done it around the world since the beginning of time, again. It's the way we all ate. What is ripe right now where I'm living? Okay, we'll take all of that for the schools and we'll buy it straight from the farmer so the farmer gets all the money.

13:10That was what changed everything for me at the restaurant is everybody wanted to sell to us because we paid them the real cost. They didn't have to pay the distributor to take the food to the restaurant. And I loved it because of the possibility of sending them back with food scraps for their gardens. And, you know, Bob Kennard was our first regenerative farmer, which I didn't know what that meant. It wasn't a term. No, it wasn't a term. No, it wasn't a term. Way back then, it wasn't. But Bob knew that there was something, the way he described regenerative to me was it's bringing the bad things up there in the sky, putting them down in the ground where they belong.

14:08Yeah. That's what he said. Yeah. Carbon neutral agriculture is truly a flashpoint today. Yes. This episode is brought to you by Grow Therapy. Have you ever tried to Google therapists near me? Just the act of typing those words in a browser can be so stressful on its own. I once went on a hunt for a therapist and found myself with a dozen tabs open with LinkedIn profiles and Instagram accounts of people I just didn't want to know. Grow Therapy makes it way less overwhelming and way more affordable. Whether it's your first time in therapy or your 50th, Grow makes it easier to find a therapist who fits your needs.

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15:27Visit growtherapy.com slash taste today to get started. That's growtherapy.com slash taste. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan. Hi there, it's Matt, co-host of the show. We are currently running a This Is Taste listener survey, and we'd love to hear from you. Do you have a guest request? A restaurant you wish we'd visit to talk about on Three Things? What about a lesser-known cookbook author who deserves a spot in our studio chair? You can let us know by clicking the link in our show notes to complete the survey. It will only take a couple minutes, I swear, and will help us continue to make the best show possible.

16:08That's the This Is Taste listener survey, link in our show notes. From February 20th to March 7th, dive into Canada's biggest culinary festival, Montreal en Lumière, an exclusive partnership with the McCord Stewart Museum and its exhibition, On the Menu Montreal, a restaurant story. The 2026 festival invites food lovers on a flavorful journey through time. Montreal's top restaurateurs will reimagine 65 years of the city's iconic astronomy, crafting inventive, nostalgia-inspired dishes with a modern twist. Prepare your palate. World-renowned chefs, including several Michelin-starred talents, will team up with over 80 of Montreal's finest local chefs to create unforgettable, one-of-a-kind menus.

16:54The full program is available at montrealonlumiere.com, presented by Lotto Quebec in collaboration with National Bank. I want to ask you about the economics of it all. I've had Jamie Oliver in here a couple times, and I've asked him a similar question. You know, there's a perception that when you buy directly from the farmer, that it's going to be innately more expensive. and the question is, is how do you get schools to buy into this program and make it cost-effective for them? Because we know these middlemen and these distributors are possibly making it work economically for the schools in a way that you really, you can't deny it.

17:39But please push back on any of that. Well, I call this school-supported agriculture because I saw what happened when the farmer's market movement began as community-supported agriculture. Now, nobody knew whether that could work either, but there's a farmer's market in practically every big town in this country in a very short period of time. I came to that one first in Union Square. Yeah, yeah. In Union Square. And I was just so thrilled that all those farmers that I loved, the organic ones, were at the farmer's market. And so for that to grow means that there are, and especially in New York, it means that there are people that really want to buy that food at that price, support those people, eat seasonally.

18:42And there are restaurants that send their trucks to the farmer's market to pick up. But I know there's another way to do it, too, is directly to the farm. Like when at the Conscious Kitchen in Marin County in San Francisco, they decided they wanted to do this, buy all organic local food seasonally. And they made a place for the kids to sit and have lunch in the gymnasium. They brought in long tables and chairs. And then the first person they asked was Strauss Derry in Marin. And Judy Schill said, can you bring in a big containers so we can pour it in glasses at the table? And so he did. He was so pleased to do that.

19:44And I was at one of those tables at the very beginning. And I just thought, I feel like I'm back in grammar school in the 1950s. and I'm drinking a glass of milk out of a glass. And I was a little afraid I wouldn't be able to drink the whole glass. But once I tasted it, drank the whole thing. And that's what happened. All the kids at the table drank the whole glass of milk. And there's something both about the taste of that milk and about sitting together and eating together. Yeah, and I think it leads to the way children are kind. And you write about this in the book, and it's smart. They're better eaters than we give them credit for.

20:37They're much more discerning diners than we give them credit for. And I think with this idea of buying directly from the farms and preparing dishes that perhaps aren't the industrial variety that are engineered to taste good for kids. You know, there's like obviously a lot of food science that goes into getting food into certain shapes and to have a certain texture that children eat. But you push back on that idea. You think that children, when given fresh produce and grains, whole grains, they will eat the food. I think, Ken, it goes right back to what is dead ripe. Right now in California, it's these pears.

21:20And we're eating those pears, and I just can't get enough of them. And I'm talking about providing that ripe food for kids in schools. And it's really pretty urgent we do this, not just for the health of the children and the delight, but because of climate change. And it's imperative that we do something that's globally possible where there's the economic engine to buy it, where everybody would love it and be educated by that. I mean, you know, when the pairs are gone, I say, what's next? What's next? What's next up? And I think let's zoom out a little bit and talk about how it can be afforded by the schools.

22:11And, you know, Jamie Oliver's work has really been in close step with the government and it's a different government, so we can't compare the two. But how do you incentivize these schools to change these programs? Does it need government intervention at the local level or federal level? It does need government intervention right now, international intervention because of climate. We have a climate emergency that they say by 2030, we can't do anything about it. And so I feel like the procurement of food in schools globally and supporting the farmers directly. You know, the mayor of Paris did this.

22:57She, about a year and a half, two years ago, she said, I want to buy all food for the schools in Paris. from regenerative organic farms within 250 miles of Paris. And she's two-thirds of the way to doing that already. So we know that it can happen. And I just know that once we had the reputation and we put that out in the world the way the mayor of Paris is, everybody wants to come to you. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's a different scale than Marin County. So that's a positive step. We have 115 ,000 public schools and private schools in America. And to get to that level of scale, but how do you get this?

23:49It doesn't have to be all 115 ,000 schools. It's not going to be possible, but even 10 % at 15 ,000. How do you get school administrators to buy in? It has to start also at the culinary level, the cooks. No question. No question. It's so much less difficult to convince the kids and the cooks. It's the administrator that has to take charge. Now, there was a young peach farmer in the Central Valley in California, and she came and spoke at this big event that we had called Climate Food Hope in D.C. before the election. And we wanted to prove that you could buy straight from the farmer and fit into the USDA reimbursement.

24:37So that was what that event was about. But this young woman felt like she had so many peaches. She should drive into the city, but it was almost two hours away. And she couldn't take that time off. So she went right over to the middle school with a couple boxes of those beautiful peaches. And the principal of the school said, I'll buy all you have, all of them. And so now she gets the real price, and she just drives all of her fruit there. And that's the reassurance that the farmer needs. And that's what we provided in the restaurant. Even when the farmer said they aren't so good this week, I said, well, you know, if we add this and that, we'll make it taste good.

25:34Bring them. And that's what they need to feel is we're there for you. I absolutely buy into this idea that at the school level, the cooks working in these kitchens have the ability to take seasonal produce from regenerative farms and make it delicious. And I want to ask you about this idea of talking to the farmers. How do you mitigate that? I know you're one person, you can't do it all. But that's going to be the key is to when, how does the school cook know from the farmers? How does that discourse happen at scale, even 10 % of 150 ,000? You can have a tasting almost at the school where you're inviting all the organic peach farmers to come or walnuts or whatever.

26:31It's an education for the cooks. It's what's happened with me. I didn't know half the things that Bob Kennard was growing, but he just sent them for me to taste. And I would say nine out of ten times, I love them. I love them more than I imagined. And so I never say no. I always say yes. Bring it down. Yeah, it's fascinating stuff. I want to talk about a couple areas of the cookbook, of the book, which has a lot of beautiful recipes. And for those at home who have picky eaters or children in the household, this may be resonant. Because I think you're crafting these recipes to really work for schools, which I think is an amazing thing.

27:19for salad? Because I think salad, like green salads, is something that we obviously have a lot of greens available all the time in growing climates, you know, throughout the country. How do you make a salad, Alice, work for a fourth grader who maybe has only had like bottled ranch dressing and iceberg? Well, knowing how I fed my kid when she was growing up and she always wanted me to make her lunch for school, and a big portion because her friends wanted to eat it too. But salad, well, first of all, I always eat it with my hands, even when I'm in a fancy restaurant. But dipping is the key. Dipping.

28:05So you have the vinaigrette in that little container, and you have all the leaves off the head of lettuce, and you just pick up one, dip it in the vinaigrette, and eat it. You can do that with Bib. You can do that with Radicchio. You can do that with anything. You can do it with any kind of salad. But you can also do it with green beans, blanched green beans. You can do it with anything. I love that sentiment. I fully can just envision. I keep thinking about my school in Western Michigan and like thinking about the 90s and 80s and like what I was eating, which was kind of scary, frankly. But like I would have liked to have had a fun dipping moment.

28:46Yes. But you need to make a good finagret. Yes, you do. And people, in order to do that, I mean, I'm addicted to kind of the garlic at the base. Yeah. And I mash it with my mortar and pestle. And then I add some salt. But I make it a paste. Yeah. Very smooth paste. And then I let the vinegar sort of cure it for, you know, even a couple of hours. So it tames the garlic, and especially at certain times of the year when it's strong. And then I add the olive oil to taste. And I think there are, you know, a lot of affordable olive oils right now. I don't want anything bitter. But you can compensate by using a sweeter vinegar.

29:44So there's always, to me, a way to make that vinaigrette taste really good. Sometimes you want to put in a little mustard. Yeah, that's my move as well. Or a little sherry vinegar. Yeah, my move as well. Something sweeter. Yeah. And I'll tell you, it just always works with teenagers. Absolutely. I think soups are an incredible opportunity for schools. You know, you're creating something, you're taking vegetables that maybe even in season they don't look the best. And you can make something that is easily served at scale. How do you think about soups in schools? I love it. And you could add a little pasta in there.

30:25Of course, yeah. And I love the pesto myself. And so in that moment, I put that in at the end in a soup. And it's just so—or garlicky. It's that thing at the end that just finishes it off. Sometimes when there's not basil, there's oregano or some other herb that is really aromatic and can mix with the pounded garlic. Yeah, if you visit any farmer's market, you're going to have so many herbs available. I mean, and things like green beans and fennel. We have to think about even broccoli that's just branched. You can dip that in that. Yeah. Lots of vegetables. And you think kids will eat this. You know children will eat this.

31:23Eat this. Eat this food. I know what children like. I mean, both them making choices for themselves. So you could have a table in a cafeteria that had a number of different vegetables on them. So if they didn't like the broccoli, they could try the green bean. And always there is something that they love. I agree. You see it time and again. You see children will eat vegetables if you have the right preparation. It's texture a lot of times. Yes, it's about the texture. They like sweet potatoes. They love squash. And it's about how you cut it too. You could leave it long like a boat. Or you could cut in little pieces.

32:13And they love to do that. Let's circle back on the USDA question. I mean, how does that funding work by your assumption with these farmers? Is there the current administration or future administrations? Is there a blanket policy that could be created that allows these farmers to get paid? Well, I just know that there is from the experience of the conscious kitchen at Marin. But I'm looking not just in this country. I'm really looking around the world. I mean, I've been to Brazil. I've been to Morocco schools. I've been all over France. I've been in Italy. And I know that this can be affordable.