Alice Waters is the revolutionary behind the birth of the farm to table movement. She is a chef, activist, author and owner of Chez Panisse, a Berkeley, California restaurant Waters opened in 1971 that’s famous for its organic and locally grown ingredients.
Here are some of the most through-provoking Alice Waters quotes.
“When you have the best and tastiest ingredients, you can cook very simply and the food will be extraordinary because it tastes like what it is.”
― Alice Waters
“Cooking and shopping for food brings rhythm and meaning to our lives.”
― Alice Waters
“Good food is a right, not a privilege. It brings children into a positive relationship with their health, community and environment.”
― Alice Waters
“Teaching kids how to feed themselves and how to live in a community responsibly is the center of an education.”
― Alice Waters
“Go to the farmers market and buy food there. You’ll get something that’s delicious. It’s discouraging that this seems like such an elitist thing. It’s not. It’s just that we have to pay the real cost of food.”
― Alice Waters
“It’s a comfort to always find pasta in the cupboard and garlic and parsley in the garden.”
― Alice Waters
“I eat meat but no meat that isn’t pastured is acceptable…”
― Alice Waters
“I think health is the outcome of finding a balance and some satisfaction at the table.”
― Alice Waters
“People have to understand that cheap food has been subsidized. We have to realize that it’s important to pay farmers up front, because they are taking care of the land.”
― Alice Waters
“Always explore your garden and go to the market before you decide what cook.”
― Alice Waters
“Let things taste of what they are.”
― Alice Waters
“This is the power of gathering: it inspires us, delightfully, to be more hopeful, more joyful, more thoughtful: in a word, more alive.”
― Alice Waters
“Our full humanity is contingent on our hospitality; we can be complete only when we are giving something away; when we sit at the table and pass the peas to the person next to us we see that person in a whole new way.”
― Alice Waters
“We have to bring children into a new relationship to food that connects them to culture and agriculture.”
― Alice Waters
“When you have the best and tastiest ingredients, you can cook very simply and the food will be extraordinary because it tastes like what it is.”
― Alice Waters
“We can’t think narrowly. We have to think in the biggest possible way.”
― Alice Waters
“How we eat can change the world”
― Alice Waters
“I feel it is an obligation to help people understand the relation of food to agriculture and the relationship of food to culture.”
― Alice Waters
“I think America’s food culture is embedded in fast-food culture. And the real question that we have is: How are we going to teach slow-food values in a fast-food world? Of course, its very, very difficult to do, especially when children have grown up eating fast food and the values that go with that.”
― Alice Waters
“To have a basic ingredient that can be prepared a million different ways is a beautiful thing.”
― Alice Waters
“The way we subsidize food makes it cheaper to go to McDonald’s and get a hamburger than a salad, and that’s insane. It’s pure government policy.”
― Alice Waters
“The problem with living in a fast-food nation is that we expect food to be cheap.”
― Alice Waters
“We’ve been so disconnected agriculturally and culturally from food. We spend more time on dieting than on cooking.”
― Alice Waters
“I feel that good food should be a right and not a privilege, and it needs to be without pesticides and herbicides. And everybody deserves this food. And that’s not elitist”
― Alice Waters
“The decisions you make are a choice of values that reflect your life in every way.”
― Alice Waters
“It is a fundamental fact that no-cook, however creative and capable, can produce a dish of a quality any higher than that of its raw ingredients.”
― Alice Waters
“People have become aware that the way that we’ve been eating is making us sick.”
― Alice Waters
“I believe that every child in this world needs to have a relationship with the land…to know how to nourish themselves…and to know how to connect with the community around them.”
― Alice Waters
“Cooking creates a sense of well-being for yourself and the people you love and brings beauty and meaning to everyday life. And all it requires is common sense – the common sense to eat seasonally, to know where your food comes from, to support and buy from local farmers and producers who are good stewards of our natural resources.”
― Alice Waters
“It’s around the table and in the preparation of food that we learn about ourselves and about the world.”
― Alice Waters
“When kids grow it and cook it they eat it.”
― Alice Waters
“Change the food in the schools and we can influence how children think. Change the curriculum and teach them how to garden and how to cook and we can show that growing food and cooking and eating together give lasting richness, meaning, and beauty to our lives.”
― Alice Waters
“Eating is an environmental act.”
― Alice Waters
“Good food depends almost entirely on good ingredients.”
― Alice Waters
“The things most worth wanting are not available everywhere all the time.”
― Alice Waters
“I have a love affair with tomatoes and corn. I remember them from my childhood. I only had them in the summer. They were extraordinary.”
― Alice Waters
“Health is the outcome of eating well.”
― Alice Waters
“Once people get connected to real food they never change back.”
― Alice Waters
“In countries around the world people spend more money on food because they know how precious it is.”
― Alice Waters
Watch this 2009 Interview of Alice Waters:
Books By Alice Waters:
- Chez Panisse Pasta, Pizza, Calzone
- Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook
- In the Green Kitchen: Techniques to Learn by Heart
- Chez Panisse Vegetables
- Fanny at Chez Panisse: A Child’s Restaurant Adventures with 46 Recipes
- Chez Panisse Café Cookbook
- Chez Panisse Cooking
- Chez Panisse Fruit
- The Art of Simple Food
- The Art of Simple Food II
- My Pantry: Homemade Ingredients That Make Simple Meals Your Own
- Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook