All About Alice Waters: Inside Alice’s Edible Schoolyard Project

Alice Waters is a chef, author, food activist, and the founder and owner of Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, California. Born in Chatham, New Jersey, she has been a champion of local, sustainable agriculture and activism for over four decades—founding the Edible Schoolyard Project and the Chez Panisse Foundation and helping create the Yale Sustainable Food Project and the Rome Sustainable Food Project at the American Academy in Rome. She has been vice president of Slow Food International since 2002. She was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama in 2015 and was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2017.

Alice is also the author of 15 books, including New York Times bestsellers The Art of Simple Food I & II, Edible Schoolyard: A Universal Idea, and Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook, a memoir.

The Edible Schoolyard Project integrates a school garden and kitchen into the heart of the teaching mission. Alice Waters founded the project at Berkeley’s Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, where children come from every possible cultural and economic background, so food is their common language. The project has grown to include a network of over 5,500 like-minded kitchen and garden programs.

During their stint in school, students grow, harvest, and cook their own food in the garden and kitchen classrooms as part of their academic curriculum—for instance, hand-grinding heirloom grain berries in a stone mortar for a history class or baking to learn fractions in math class. Every class session concludes with a plate of food around the table, encouraging students to talk about what they’ve done and learn basic etiquette, such as not eating until everyone has been served or asking politely for food to be passed.

The Edible Schoolyard Project has served as an incubator for a universal idea that Alice terms “edible education.” This form of education serves as a hopeful and delicious way to counteract the industrialization of public schools, teaching young people to take care of the land, support sustainable food culture and local farmers, and revitalize public education.

Alice Waters’s Edible Schoolyard Project is founded upon what she calls “edible education,” a way to help students reconnect to food and the land. Edible education operates with these principles in mind:

1. 1. Food is a powerful teacher. Food can be an academic subject. A kitchen, cafeteria, and school garden should be integral to the school’s academic mission. Ecology and gastronomy help bring alive every subject, from reading and writing to science and art. Food educates all of the senses.
2. 2. The cafeteria is the heart of the school. Good food is a right, not a privilege. From preschool through high school, every child deserves a wholesome, delicious, sustainable, free school lunch every day. Learning to eat good food, seated together at the table, teaches human values; it builds community and brings children into a positive relationship with their health and the environment.
3. 3. Schools support sustainable agriculture. When school cafeterias buy seasonal, fresh food directly from local, sustainable farms and ranches—not only for health reasons—it becomes a way of understanding our interdependency with nature and the world outside the school.
4. 4. Children learn by doing. A hands-on education, in which the children themselves do the work in the vegetable gardens and on the cutting boards, awakens their senses and opens their minds to their academic subjects and the world around them.
5. 5. Beauty is the language of care. A beautifully prepared environment, where deliberate thought has gone into everything from the garden paths to the plates on the tables, communicates to children that the program cares about them.

Alice Waters has published many cookbooks during her prolific career as a professional chef. Here are a few of the most popular:

1. 1. Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook (1982): One of Alice’s first cookbooks, her menu cookbook for her restaurant, is still one of her most famous, featuring unique menus—appetizers, entréss, sides, and desserts—for any occasion.
2. 2. Chez Panisse Vegetables (1996): Alice’s vegetables cookbook is a guidebook dedicated to produce—seasonality, availability, preparation, and cooking.
3. 3. Chez Panisse Café Cookbook (1999): After Alice’s restaurant, Chez Panisse, became widely popular, Alice decided to open up a second restaurant—smaller and more informal—on the floor above. This cookbook includes over a hundred recipes from the café’s bistro-style menu.
4. 4. Chez Panisse Fruit (2002): Alice’s fruit cookbook is a follow-up to her bestselling Chez Panisse Vegetables, discussing the seasonality, availability, preparation, and cooking of various fruits.
5. 5. The Art of Simple Food (2007): Alice was a pioneer of the slow food movement. The Art of Simple Food is considered a must-read if you’re interested in fresh choices—particularly local produce and responsibly raised meat.
6. 6. In the Green Kitchen: Techniques to Learn by Heart (2010): In this cookbook, aimed toward beginners, Alice lays out the cooking techniques that she considers essential to the kitchen, along with recipes and tips.
7. 7. The Art of Simple Food II (2013): A follow-up to The Art of Simple Food, this cookbook expands upon the lessons and recipes included in the first volume.
8. 8. Fanny in France: Travel Adventures of a Chef’s Daughter, with Recipes (2016): Part autobiography, part cookbook, Fanny in France is a book for children that includes stories from Alice’s daughter and her travels in France with her mother and 40 recipes for young chefs.
9. 9. My Pantry: Homemade Ingredients That Make Simple Meals Your Own (2015): My Pantry is a hybrid of essays and recipes that takes a deep dive into Alice’s own kitchen and pantry, showing how she sources or makes various cooking staples (from chicken stock to olive oil) for her unique food.

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