Bringing Alice Waters to Aggie Square

Alice Waters’ legacy is probably secure at this point.

The 78-year-old founder of landmark Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse is among the forerunners of the farm-to-table and slow food movements. Her nonprofit Edible Schoolyard Project helps provide food education at more than 6,000 schools. Waters even helped inspire an organic garden at the White House during the early days of Barack Obama’s presidency.

But Waters isn’t done just yet.

Waters will be among the anchor tenants with her Alice Waters Institute for Edible Education at the $1.2 billion research and innovation center Aggie Square currently under construction in Sacramento. UC Davis Chancellor Gary May announced plans for the institute back in 2020.

And recently, Waters gave a 27-minute interview via Zoom to California Local, expounding on her background and her vision for her institute at Aggie Square. “I just said, ‘If we do a model here, with UC, it will go across the country, it will go around the world,’” Waters said.

Waters: Convictions About Fresh Food that Run Deep

In Northern California, Waters is one of the hallowed names in food, families waiting months on the reservation list and traveling far distances for tables at Chez Panisse, which has operated in Berkeley since 1971.

Originally from New Jersey, Waters had attended UC Berkeley and trained at a Montessori school in the United Kingdom prior to opening her restaurant.

“I’ve been 52 years at Chez and what has made it what it is is the local seasonal, organic, regenerative food that we serve,” Waters said. “I'm absolutely convinced about that. It’s about taste. And the only way that you will have taste is if you pick it in your backyard when it’s ripe.”

This philosophy has been evident to others since the restaurant’s early days, with the Los Angeles Times noting Waters’ devotion to fresh ingredients in 1978.

“Many a food snob raves about the virtues of some rare ingredient, and there are others who insist on the freshest food on grounds that the fresher it is, the more healthful, but with Chez Panisse cooks and their tight circle of friends, something besides snobbery or health consciousness seems to be at work,” Charles Perry wrote. “The word for it is obsession.”

Waters is also a proponent of the Slow Food Movement, which was founded in Italy in 1981 by Carlo Petrini as a localized alternative to fast food. In 2021, Waters came out with a book, “We Are What We Eat: A Slow Food Manifesto.”

“The thesis of that book is that that we have been eating fast food for 50-60 years; and we’ve been eating the values that come along with the food, that time is money, that more is better, that food should be fast, cheap and easy, that it should be available 24/7, I want what I want, I don’t want to eat, it’s okay to eat in the car, uniformity,” Waters said.

Waters, who was active in the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the 1960s, added, “All of those ideas have just spread around this country. I do believe that’s because we’ve lost our democracy and we’ve really become, I think, imprisoned by these beliefs.”

Star Power

As Waters’ stature through Chez Panisse grew, there’s a direction she could have gone, said celebrated humorist Calvin Trillin, one of several famous board members for the Edible Schoolyard Project. “She had a successful restaurant,” Trillin said. “One thing to do when that happens is to get one in Las Vegas or start a chain or something like that. And instead she’s gone for sustainable agriculture and fresh food.”

In the mid-1990s, Waters got a call from Neil Smith, the principal of Martin Luther King Middle School in Berkeley, who told Waters that he knew she liked gardens and that maybe she could come to his school and help beautify it. After talking with Smith, Waters got permission to create whatever she wanted at the school.

Of course, Waters created a garden for the school.

“She pointed out for me that in some of the poorest neighborhoods in Berkeley, the kids were getting amazing experiences because of the garden,” said former California State Superintendent Delaine Eastin, who worked with Waters on creating three curriculum guides related to nutrition and who has been a board member of the Edible Schoolyard Project for more than 20 years.

Waters created more than just a garden, though. Drawing on her Montessori training, Waters created an outdoor kitchen classroom where students could get a keen idea of exactly where their food was sourced from, while they took classes in any number of different school subjects.

“When they were doing geography of the Middle East, they’d be cooking pita bread and hummus,” Waters said. “And I just watched that transform the whole experience of being in school, they loved this class.”

Eventually, the Edible Schoolyard Project spread dramatically. During her interview with California Local, Waters held a map aloft with locations identified all over the United States.

The project is now in 6,200 schools worldwide. The organization’s website describes it as “a nonprofit organization dedicated to the transformation of public education by using organic school gardens, kitchens, and cafeterias to teach both academic subjects and the values of nourishment, stewardship, and community.”

Getting to Aggie Square

Clearly, Waters could have lived out her life holding court at Chez Panisse, spreading change through the Edible Schoolyard Project, and writing books. She wanted something more, though.

Waters said she spoke with former University of California President Janet Napolitano, who served from 2013 to 2020, prior to Napolitano leaving office. Napolitano, who thought that the institute could be part of carbon neutrality efforts, brought her successor Michael Drake to Waters’ back yard.

Meanwhile, May had brought an idea with him to UC Davis when he arrived to serve as chancellor in 2017 from the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he’d helped to build Technology Square, a research and innovation center in downtown Atlanta.

The idea, Aggie Square, is a partnership between the school and city of Sacramento whose first phase could open later this year or early next year, employing thousands and creating cutting-edge life sciences work. Eventually, school leadership reached out to Waters, with Waters agreeing wholeheartedly to take part.

Waters envisions a big table where people can talk, similar to Chez Panisse. She wants space for 100 people to sit so that when there are cooking demonstrations, she can invite people from Sacramento. She wants lectures, films, and for her institute to feel like a community center.

Among the institute’s main purposes, Waters wants to teach her style of cooking, demonstrate the ease of connecting with farmers, and bring what she termed “the powers that be in Sacramento into conversations with people who are from around the world.” Guest speakers could include Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser, The Omnivore’s Dilemma author Michael Pollan, and Petrini, now president of Slow Food International.

Elisa Demichelis, director and coordinator for the global north office of Slow Food International, said in a Zoom interview from Italy that her organization was interested and “open to collaboration, especially with well-established entities, universities.”

Some details about the current state of Waters’ project are unknown at this juncture, with May, project leader Robert Segar, and Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg all declining to be interviewed for this article. Offices for May and Steinberg each provided brief statements of support.

Eastin, who is a UC Davis graduate, is excited for what Waters’ project can do.

“I think it’s a marvelous next step for our university,” Eastin said. “They’ve been great in agriculture, they’ve been great in animal husbandry, and they’ve been wonderful about so many aspects of food, but not as much the cooking piece. And I just am thrilled that they’re going in that direction, because I think it completes the picture.”

Waters also said she’s appreciated enthusiasm for the project shown by Gov. Gavin Newsom and First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom.

In a statement provided by her office for this article, Siebel Newsom said that the institute “will bridge the gap between school nutrition directors, local regenerative farmers, and school food service personnel and culinary chefs—helping us to scale Farm to School across California and cultivate lifelong healthy eaters, culinary rockstars, and climate stewards.”

As for Waters, she hopes the institute will be part of her legacy.

“This idea, absolutely,” Waters said. “School-supported agriculture, where the schools become the economic engine to support the people who take care of the land for our future, I can’t think of anything more important right at this moment.”