Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Monday 17 November
6:30 PM - 7:30 PM
From the earliest days of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, Alice Waters has stood out from the crowd. Taking her lead from the farmers and small producers who supplied the restaurant, over the decades Alice Waters has come to symbolise the importance of true seasonality, regionality and sheer dedication to fine produce and the best farming methods. Alice has been named as one of Time’s 100 Most Influential people and was this year’s Wall Street Journal Innovator of the Year.
Since launching her Edible Schoolyard project in 1996, she’s extended her influence to the cooks, farmers and eaters of the future, even inspiring Michelle Obama to plant a kitchen garden at the White House. And she comes to Australia from Terra Madre – the biennial gathering in Italy of farmers and food producers from around the globe created by the international Slow Food movement.
Meet this truly iconic figure, one of the most influential food thinkers of our times. Introduction by Stephanie Alexander.
Presented in partnership with the Age Good Food Month.
Featuring
Alice Waters
Alice Waters is an American chef, author, food advocate and proprietor of Chez Panisse. She is vice president of Slow Food International, a nonprofit organization that promotes and celebrates local artisanal food traditions and has 100,000 members in over 130 countries. Waters is also the author of eight books, including The Art of Simple Food: Notes and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution.
Over the course of nearly forty years, Chez Panisse has helped create a community of scores of local farmers and ranchers whose dedication to sustainable agriculture assures the restaurant a steady supply of fresh and pure ingredients. It is guided by Waters' culinary philosophy, maintaining that cooking should be based on the finest and freshest seasonal ingredients that are produced sustainably and locally. She is a passionate advocate for a food economy that is ‘good, clean, and fair’.
In 1996, Waters’s commitment to education led to the creation of The Edible Schoolyard at Berkeley’s Martin Luther King, Jr., Middle School: a one-acre garden, an adjacent kitchen-classroom, and an ‘eco-gastronomic’ curriculum. By actively involving a thousand students in all aspects of the food cycle, The Edible Schoolyard is a model public education program that instils the knowledge and values we need to build a humane and sustainable future.
The program is nationally recognized for its efforts to integrate gardening, cooking, and sharing school lunch into the core academic curriculum. Alice established the Chez Panisse Foundation in 1996 to support the Schoolyard and encourage similar programs that use food traditions to teach, nurture, and empower young people. The success of The Edible Schoolyard led to the School Lunch Initiative, whose national agenda integrates a nutritious daily lunch and gardening experience into the academic curriculum of all public schools in the United States.
Stephanie Alexander
Stephanie Alexander AO is regarded as one of Australia's great food educators. Her reputation has been earned through her thirty years as an owner-chef in several restaurants, as the author of 14 influential books and ...
Nina Rousseau
Editor of The Age Cheap Eats for the past four editions, Nina Rousseau has been writing about food, and reviewing Melbourne and Victorian restaurants for the past 10 years.
She is a regular contributor to The Age Good Food Guide and The Age Epicure, and has also worked as a guidebook author for Lonely Planet Publications.