Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook by Alice Waters - 2017- 320 Pages

 

Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook by Alice Waters - 2017 - 320 Pages

This week's menu at Chez Panisse

YouTube has a number of videos on Alice Waters and her restaurant Chez Panisse.

"New York Times bestselling and critically acclaimed memoir from cultural icon and culinary standard bearer Alice Waters recalls the circuitous road and tumultuous times leading to the opening of what is arguably America's most influential restaurant.

 

When Alice Waters opened the doors of her "little French restaurant" in Berkeley, California in 1971 at the age of 27, no one ever anticipated the indelible mark it would leave on the culinary landscape—Alice least of all. Fueled in equal parts by naiveté and a relentless pursuit of beauty and pure flavor, she turned her passion project into an iconic institution that redefined American cuisine for generations of chefs and food lovers. In Coming to My Senses Alice retraces the events that led her to 1517 Shattuck Avenue and the tumultuous times that emboldened her to find her own voice as a cook when the prevailing food culture was embracing convenience and uniformity.  Moving from a repressive suburban upbringing to Berkeley in 1964 at the height of the Free Speech Movement and campus unrest, she was drawn into a bohemian circle of charismatic figures whose views on design, politics, film, and food would ultimately inform the unique culture on which Chez Panisse was founded. Dotted with stories, recipes, photographs, and letters, Coming to My Senses is at once deeply personal and modestly understated, a quietly revealing look at one woman's evolution from a rebellious yet impressionable follower to a respected activist who effects social and political change on a global level through the common bond of food." From the publisher 

I highly recommend Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook by Alice Waters.  It is numerous things combined,  a  memoir of growing up in middle class America in the 1950s and 60, a marvelous account of the counter cultural anti-Vietnam war era, her transformational time in Paris, her several romances and of course her love of food culminating in the opening of her restaurant in 1971.  

"Alice Waters (born April 28, 1944, Chatham, New Jersey, U.S.) is an American restaurateur, chef, and food activist who was a leading proponent of the “slow food” movement, which billed itself as the healthy antithesis to fast food.

Waters studied French culture at the University of California, Berkeley, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1967. She participated in the 1960s Free Speech Movement, and the idealism that was then prevalent at Berkeley was reflected in her ideology throughout her career. She studied abroad for a time in France, and it was there that her love of farm-to-plate dining took hold. Following graduation, Waters spent a year studying at the International Montessori School in London before returning to California to teach.

In the 1970s the United States was still years away from the “foodie revolution,” which by 2009 had brought farmers’ markets and organic foods to a larger audience. Waters’s prescient passion for whole, unprocessed foods inspired her and her friend Lindsey Shere to found a market-inspired restaurant in Berkeley, California, despite having little capital and no experience as restaurateurs. When Chez Panisse opened in 1971, it was with a relatively untrained staff, a set fixed-price menu that changed daily, and an uncompromising dedication to a vision that seemed to many untenable: Waters wanted to create meals that used only locally grown seasonal ingredients, and she wanted to forge relationships with the producers and suppliers of these items. 

The advocacy venture for which she became best known was the Edible Schoolyard, originally established in 1995. Waters began the program by planting a garden in the yard of Berkeley’s Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School. A cooking classroom was installed a few years later, and by 2009 the Edible Schoolyard was a thriving educational tool, though not a source of lunchroom produce. The program expanded to include affiliates in other cities, including New Orleans and Los Angeles. From the Edible Schoolyard grew Waters’s new cause, that of persuading the government to increase funding to improve school lunch programs. Her indomitable dedication to providing schoolchildren with more healthful-eating options earned Waters a fair share of detractors, who argued that seasonal food was a dispensable luxury for already underfunded schools. As with her restaurant, however, her philosophy regarding the project was “If we do it right, the money will come.”

The James Beard Foundation named Chez Panisse outstanding restaurant and Waters outstanding chef in 1992; the foundation also presented her with a lifetime achievement award in 2004. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007, received the French Legion of Honor in 2009, and was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2015. Waters wrote a number of cookbooks and We Are What We Eat: A Slow Food Manifesto (2021; written with Bob Carrau and Cristina Mueller). Her memoir, Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook, was published in 2017." From The Encyclopedia Britanica