"Food revolutionary" Alice Waters wants candidates to talk about "awful state of the food system"

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT: Lunch With Alice Waters, Food Revolutionary
By KIM SEVERSON
Published: September 19, 2007

....By all measures, Ms. Waters should be relaxing at this point in her life. She is 63. She has held court with princes and presidents. A year ago, with some prodding from her partners at the restaurant, she pulled back from the daily work at Chez Panisse. Now she is trying to become better at leveraging her role as the high priestess of the local, sustainable food revolution....So why does Ms. Waters still seem so restless, so unsatisfied, so unrelentingly demanding that she can’t show up at someone’s house and trust that they might have the right olive oil?

Because true, radical change — a country full of people who eat food that is good for them, good for the people who grow it and good for the earth — is simply not coming fast enough. She is dismayed by the presidential candidates and said she has vowed not to vote for anyone who does not talk about the awful state of the food system.

Her pioneering Edible Schoolyard project, in which schoolchildren grow their own lunch and teachers use gardens for science lessons and recipes for social studies, is thriving in Berkeley, has been planted in New Orleans and may expand to Pittsburgh and Brooklyn. But in more than a decade the concept has not permeated the nation’s thinking on education. Although many school districts are trying to improve the food they offer, the results have been unsatisfying, she said. It’s useless to coat frozen chicken nuggets with whole-wheat bread crumbs and fill vending machines with diet soda. Only a complete and radical reform will do, and it must be led by the president of the United States.

“These are little Band-Aids,” she said. “The whole body is bleeding and we must stop it. We simply must.” A revolution in how we eat means respecting food and the people who produce it, she said. In her world, every aspect of this revolution, be it related to agricultural policy, the environment or obesity, must begin with a plate of lovely, locally produced food and work backward from there.

She’s also concerned about whether the Slow Food organization, which began with protests of a McDonald’s in Rome, will ever become as influential here as it has been in Europe. Although she has helped the United States organization grow to 171 chapters since its inception in 2000, she would like Slow Food and the concept of eco-gastronomy to be as much a part of the political discussion as foreign policy....

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/19/dining/19wate.html?ei=5087%0A&em=&en=c58565a4608aea4a&ex=1190347200&pagewanted=all

[Hydra]

1. Let's see what their likely take on that is...

"Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat."
Hermann Göring

[loudsue]

2. Now THAT is an idea whose time has come!

To have a legislature who actually CARED that we're getting poisoned by our food would be a step into the 21st century I could support 100%.

The chinese are putting poison in everything they ship to the U.S.

:kick:

[kestrel91316]

3. Sorry, Alice. Food security is so boring. Wars and terra are exciting!

[valerief]

4. Hey, Congress, go ask Alice! nt

[Summer93]

5. Slow Food

I suspect that children growing up now have no idea where their food starts and how it prepared for them.

A lot of people I talk to think that eggs are considered dairy and meat only applies to beef not chicken, pork, buffalo, turkey.

I grew up working on a veggie farm and have a lot of respect for people who do that work and much prefer local produce. It tastes so much better. Whole food can be used in so many ways to enrich our lives.

If we all purchased local food and found out how good it can be we could change our local, national, international foods and economy.

[Karenina]

6. Yup.