Alice Waters, renowned chef, author, culinary activist and founder and owner of At Panissebecame the tenth recipient of the Julia Child Award on October 17, awarded by The Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and Culinary Arts.

A pioneer in the use of seasonal, local ingredients in a fine-dining restaurant in the United States, Waters will use the matching $50,000 grant to support her favorite cause, The Edible Schoolyard Project, which is also behind The Alice Waters Institute for Edible Education and Regenerative Agriculture.

Child and Waters became good friends and even appeared together on an episode of the Child’s PBS series. Cooking with great chefs. Like Child, Waters has changed the way people think about food on a large scale, through his work in regenerative agriculture.

I had the great honor of speaking to him recently about the award, his relationship with Child, and the future of food and agriculture.

Claudia Alarcón:

I understand that you and Julia were very good friends. How did this happen?

Alice Waters:

She came (to Panisse) with a very good friend, Marion Cunningham, for the first year or two. I don’t remember exactly when. You know, we only had one menu, you didn’t have a choice. And she said, “Oh, it’s like eating at someone’s house,” and I thought that was the best compliment I could have. And she took me under her wing; she was my older sister, and it was so important, especially in the early days of the restaurant, to have someone like her, who had written the Bible of French cooking, to validate what I was doing in such a way. particular.

Alarcon:

And that’s what makes you so loyal and unique in what you’ve done.

Waters:

Well, yeah. I’m looking for the taste. I just know the power it has to convince people, and it’s something I’ve used for 53 years. And I’m sure it’s local food; It’s about choosing food when it’s good. You can’t ship it; I have to eat it there. And I know it’s all about the soil, how organic soil not only provides nutrition, but also contributes to the flavor of things.

Alarcon:

I was very lucky to have been invited (to Panisse). I never dreamed. Everything was delicious, but dessert was a local nectarine, on a cute little platter with a cute little knife. And I was like, exactly! This is the essence of Chez, and it was so striking. I will always remember it. It was wonderful.

Waters:

I love him. This is the best thing we can remember from Chez. He said: “I ate something wonderful there. And I’m going to go back. But people come back and say, “Do you have the nectarine?” So we say it’s not the right month for a nectarine, but we have something else. It is what it is, and you can’t have that taste unless you’re where it grows. You just can’t have that experience.

And it was important to me, when I lived in France. I happened to go there right after college and had never had food like this before. I just woke up. When I was a child we had a victory garden during the war, so did my parents. And so, after the war, they kept it all their lives. And no matter where they moved, they had this. So, as a little child, I tasted strawberries in the garden and I will not forget that taste. It was just a matter of finding the right ones and tasting if they were ripe and what you wanted them to taste like, but we lost that.

Alarcon:

Yes, it’s sad.

Waters:

This is the globalization of the world and the introduction of the world of fast food. We want everything to be quick, cheap and easy, and we want it when we want it. That’s it. I want an avocado every day of the year, and in California we can get it for two months when it’s in season, and it’s very limited, and it’s not everywhere in California.

I always imagine that we can learn from people all over the world exactly what the climate should be for a particular ingredient and get those seeds, because who knew we could grow all colors of carrots. Our seed banks are limited to the US, and we haven’t really explored the world and I just can’t wait for this to be something we can all share.

Alarcon:

In Mexico we have excellent strawberries, but now it’s easier to find Driskill strawberries from California and plums from Chile…

Waters:

That’s why I want the public school system to use the public procurement money that already exists to support farmers, ranchers and fishermen who are doing things the right way, who are tackling the climate and to health. At the beginning of Chez, when we found this farmer who was the organic regenerative farmer and he said I will train you to cook ingredients from my farm directly if you give me your food compost, and so we started this relationship, and he I was paid at the real price. It is the intermediary, the delivery person, who takes the money.

So if we use the school system to buy directly and support the farmer – I call it school supported agriculture, so it’s like community supported agriculture where you buy directly from the farmers market . And you give them the money they need to pay their farm workers and get the job done. And you exchange ideas. I view this as the only global solution to climate change right now, and I view it as the only delicious solution.

Alarcon:

This makes so much sense. Our leaders are deaf to this sort of thing, which is why we need voices like yours that carry that much weight and can really influence people.

Waters:

Well, that’s what I wanted to do before this election, and I know Kamala Harris believes in it. She shops at the Washington DC Farmers Market and has a great understanding of cooking and eating together. I would like people from all over the world to be there, it’s very important to me. This is something that many people in all countries are thinking about. I mean, that’s what we have in common. Food and agriculture. And if we take advantage of this opportunity in schools, we can educate the next generation, which we must do.

Alarcon:

Yeah. If we want to have a planet in 50 years, we have to do it.

Waters:

Four or six years! The UN says we need to do this quickly, and this is something we could do quickly. Stop buying processed food, take that money and give it to people who care. I mean, we didn’t do this (buy industrial food) until 1950. The reason I have so much confidence in getting this idea out there is because 30 years ago I started the project Edible Schoolyard in a school. And here we are, 30 years later, and 6,500 schools.

This involves using a garden and kitchen room to teach all academic subjects, it is a Montessori idea of ​​learning by doing. So when you’re in the kitchen room studying Middle Eastern geography, you’re making and eating pita bread, hummus, and greens. And you learn where it grows, and you learn your geography lesson through all your senses. And these are pathways that lead to our minds, but we no longer use them.

Alarcon:

And the Julia Child Prize comes with a stipend that you can use for this project?

Waters:

Yes, I give it to the Schoolyard Project, and we only have one school in Berkeley, and we have a class every summer, an academy, that invites people from all over the world to come and learn. We started with five schools in the United States 30 years ago to know that it could be in a cold climate, in a big city or in a small town. We wanted a proof of concept, and it proved effective in all of these places. And then the schools that we created became independent. They didn’t depend on us for money or anything. And now they created their own networks, and that’s how it spread.

Alarcon:

It’s incredible. It’s just comforting and hopeful. We need every ounce of hope.

Waters:

Every ounce of hope.

In Mexico, you’ve always had a culture of respect for food and farmers. And eat together. We were Puritans from England, and so we never had the pleasures of the table. We never drank wine and loved everyone sitting around the table. So while there have been big changes in terms of understanding food since Julia Child, it’s not enough to really change the population, especially a population that is now addicted to fast food. The only place you can do this is at school.

And I know for sure that when kids grow it and cook it, they all eat it. It doesn’t matter what it is. It’s accountability. And using things like garlic, you know? And spices and chilies and all that. And the edible schoolyard kids, when they cook, they choose which spices they want to add to a dish.

So, I think if Kamala is elected, she will help. Because she perfectly understands and lives this way herself. Michelle Obama planting an organic garden at the White House made Italian headlines. And she has a big foundation now in Chicago and her focus is absolutely education, like mine, because that’s the only place where you can really teach a lot of people something else; I mean, we can’t expect to make changes if we don’t teach in school.

The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.