Medium Raw

A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook

Anthony Bourdain

12 “Go Ask Alice”

To him the markets were like the stomach of the shopkeeping classes, the stomach of all the folks of average rectitude puffing itself out, rejoicing, glistening in the sunshine, and declaring that everything was for the best.

—ÉMILE ZOLA, LE VENTRE DE PARIS

Alice Waters wants to help. Shortly after Barack Obama’s election victory, the “Mother of Slow Food” wrote the new president a letter, advising him of his first order of business: that “the purity and wholesomeness of the Obama movement must be accompanied by a parallel effort in food at the most visible and symbolic place in America—the White House.”

Reminding the president that they had helped raise money for him, she proposed that she and her friends, then–Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl and restaurateur Danny Meyer, be brought aboard immediately, “as a small advisory group—a ‘Kitchen Cabinet’ if you will—to help with your selection of a White House chef. A person with integrity and devotion to the ideals of environmentalism, health and conservation…”

That there already was a chef at the White House, a person of “integrity and devotion,” seems not to have occurred to Ms. Waters. Nor did it seem to matter that this chef had been sourcing and serving largely organic, local, and sustainable food for years—or that there already was a kitchen garden. Making the mistake of judging a kitchen staff solely by its customers, Waters, observing—or at least hearing of—the previous tenant, no doubt assumed the worst. But I doubt she considered the matter long enough for even a cursory Google search.

It was, as it so often is, ultimately, all about Alice. “I cannot forget the vision I have had since 1993,” she gushed beatifically, “of a beautiful vegetable garden on the White House lawn. It would demonstrate to the nation and to the world our priority of stewardship of the land—a true victory garden!”

She got her garden in the end, as things turned out. Though the new president managed to resist the temptation to appoint Ms. Waters to government office.

As ham-fisted and clumsy as this approach was, a crude and obvious blend of self-aggrandizement and genuine good intentions, it would probably have gone down a lot better had Waters bothered to vote in the previous forty-four years. Whatever your politics, you have to admit that the differences both philosophical and practical between Bush and Gore and Bush and Kerry were…striking, to say the least. Those were close contests. Whichever way you went—your vote inarguably counted for something. One need only read the front page of the newspaper to see how that decision played out and will continue to play out for some years. So there’s simply no way Alice or anybody else can realistically make the argument that “there’s no difference, man, it’s all the same military-industrial complex.” I am, admittedly, bitter about this. It sticks in my craw. It’s something about Waters that I just can’t get past.

After she had boasted of not voting since 1966, it seemed a little…crass of Waters to presume to now tell the president what to do. Particularly as he’d arrived in the White House facing a newly collapsed worldwide financial system, spiraling unemployment, and two wars—both of which were going badly. Americans were being thrown out of work in unheard-of numbers, and here was Alice, leaping on board to promote, among other things, the idea that we should be spending more on food. But then, tone and timing have never been a strong point with Waters.

Let it be said that, on balance, I would like the world to look, someday, much like Alice probably wants it to look. A city on a hill—or many cities on hills—surrounded by unbroken vistas of beautiful countryside; small, thriving, family-run farms growing organic, seasonal, and sustainable fruits and vegetables specific to the region. Healthy, happy, antibiotic-free animals would graze freely over the land, depositing their perfectly odorless, organic shit back into the food chain so other wonderful things might grow…The schoolchildren of the inner cities would sit down each day to healthy, balanced, and entirely organic meals cooked—by happy, self-actualized, and enlightened workers—to crispy perfection. Evil lawyers and stockbrokers and vice presidents of development for Bruckheimer Productions would leave their professions and return in great numbers to work the fields of this new agrarian wonderland, becoming better people in the process. In this New Age of Enlightenment, the Dark Forces of Fast Food would wither and die—as the working poor abandoned them to rush home between jobs and cook wild-nettle risotto for their kids. It would all be clean and safe and nobody would get hurt. And it would all look…kind of like Berkeley.

Or Italy. Not the real Italy, mind you. But the Italy of wine labels. The Italy of romantic-weekend comedies, where lonely, wistful divorcees end up getting joyously boned by lusty young handymen who wear bandannas around their necks and speak with charming accents. The Italy of I Love Lucy, where Italian peasants pick and stomp grapes themselves.

Spend any time in the real Italy, however, and you quickly realize that Italians don’t really pick grapes much anymore, and they certainly don’t stomp them either. They don’t pick tomatoes—or olives—and they don’t shear their sheep. Their tomatoes and olives are picked largely by underpaid Africans and Eastern Europeans, seasonal hires, brought in for that purpose—who are then demonized and complained about for the rest of the year. (Except when blowing motorists in the off-season—as can be readily observed on the outskirts of even the smallest Italian communities these days.) The vaunted soil of Italy is as advertised, depending on who you are and where you live. If you live near Naples, though, the chances are good that your farmland is a not-so-secret dumping ground for toxic industrial waste from the north. Here, the true stewards of the earth are neither chefs nor grandmothers nor slow-food devotees. They’re the Naples-based fraternal organization, the Camorra. And the old man growing olives in his backyard in Chi-anti probably doesn’t make a living selling olive oil. He gets by renting his house to Germans.

So, who will work the Elysian Fields of Alice’s imaginary future? Certainly not her neighbors—whose average household income is currently about $85,000 a year. Unless, perhaps, at the point of a gun. And with Waters’s fondness for buzzwords like “purity” and “wholesomeness,” there is a whiff of the jackboot, isn’t there? A certainty, a potentially dangerous lack of self-doubt, the kind of talk that, so often in history, leads to actions undertaken for the “common good.” While it was excessive and bombastic of me to compare Alice to “Pol Pot in a muumuu,” it is useful to remember that he was once a practicing Buddhist and, later, attended the Sorbonne. And that even in his twisted and genocidal “back to earth” movement, he might once have meant well, too.

Who will work these fields?

No. Really. Somebody’s going to have to answer that question soon.

If, somehow, we manage to bring monstrously evil agribusinesses like Monsanto to their knees, free up vast tracts of arable land for small, seasonal, sustainable farming, where’s all the new help coming from? Seems to me, we’re facing one of two scenarios. Either enormous numbers of people who’ve never farmed before are suddenly convinced that waking up at five a.m. and feeding chickens and then working the soil all day is a desirable thing. Or, in the far more likely case, we’ll revert to the traditional method: importing huge numbers of desperately poor brown people from elsewhere—to grow those tasty, crunchy vegetables for more comfortable white masters. So, while animals of the future might be cruelty-free, which would allow those who can afford to eat them to do so with a clean conscience, what about life for those who will have to shovel the shit from their stalls?

Okay. Let’s say the entire American economy upends itself in fabulous and unpredictable ways, that America suddenly craves fresh vegetables with the ferocity it now has for chicken parts (or anything else) fried in batter—that the boards of directors and top management at Monsanto and Cargill and Con-Agra and Tyson and Smithfield are all indicted, convicted, and packed off to jail (something I’d very much like to see, by the way) for…I don’t know…criminal mediocrity. That farming suddenly becomes the profession of choice for a whole new generation of idealistic Americans. Groovy. I know I’m for it.

I am a proud hypocrite. I feed my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter exclusively organic food. My wife is Italian. Around my house, we’re more than willing to wait until next year for fresh tomatoes. We enjoy the changing of the seasons and the bounty of the surrounding Hudson Valley—and, of course, the bounty of Spain and Italy as well, readily available at Agata and Valentina, the fantastic but nosebleed-expensive Italian market in our neighborhood, New York’s Upper East Side. This celebrity-chef thing is a pretty-good-paying gig.

But what about the Upper Peninsula of Michigan? Or somewhere on the margins of Detroit? What if I were an out-of-work auto worker, living on public assistance or a part-time job? At least I have time to dig a “victory” garden, right? What does Alice suggest I do if I don’t live in the Bay Area, my fields turgid with the diverted waters of the Colorado River?

Not a problem! “You have to think of a different kind of menu,” says Alice. “You eat dried fruit and nuts. You make pasta sauces out of canned tomatoes…you’re eating different kinds of grains—farro with root vegetables. All the root vegetables are there, and now, because of the heirloom varieties, you can have a beautiful winter palette…Turnips of every color and shape! Carrots that are white and red and orange and pink! You have different preparations of long-cooking meat…Cabbages!…”

Basically, you can eat like a fucking Russian peasant, is what she’s saying. I don’t know if that’s what they want to hear in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan or Buffalo.

And…what about the healthy, pure, wholesome, and organic foods that Alice says I should be buying—particularly if I have children? If I’m making an even average wage as, say, a sole-providing police officer or middle manager? Regular milk is about four bucks a gallon. Organic is about twice that. Supermarket grapes are about four bucks a bunch. Organic are six. More to the point, what if I’m one of the vast numbers of working poor, getting by in the service sector? What should I do? How can I afford that?

Asked this very question directly, Alice advises blithely that one should “Make a sacrifice on the cell phone or a third pair of Nike shoes.”

It’s an unfortunate choice of words. And a telling one, I think. You know, those poor people—always with their Nikes and their cell phones. If only they’d listen to Alice. She’d lead them to the promised land for sure.

What else should we be doing? Alice says we should immediately spend 27 billion dollars to ensure every schoolchild in America gets a healthy, organic lunch. More recently, she added to this number with the suggestion that fresh flowers on every lunchroom table might also be a worthwhile idea.

This is, after all, “more important than crime in the streets. This is not like homeland security—this actually is the ultimate homeland security. This is more important than anything else.”

Which is where Alice really loses me—because, well, for me, as a New Yorker, however quaint the concept, homeland security is still about keeping suicidal mass murderers from flying planes into our fucking buildings. And organic school lunches might be more important to you than crime in the streets in Berkeley—but in the underfunded school systems of West Baltimore, I suspect, they feel differently. A healthy lunch is all fine and good—but no use at all to Little Timmy if he gets shot to death on the way to school. In fact, 27 billion for organic food for Timmy seems a back-assward priority right now—as, so far, we’ve failed miserably to even teach him to read. What kind of dreams can a well-fed boy have if he doesn’t even have the tools to articulate them? How can he build a world for himself if he doesn’t know how to ask for—much less how to get—the things he wants and needs? I, for one, would be very satisfied if Timmy gets a relatively balanced slab of fresh but nonorganic meatloaf with a side of competently frozen broccoli—along with reading skills and a chance at a future. Once literate, well read, and equipped with the tools to actually make his way in this world, he’ll be far better prepared to afford Chez Panisse.

As of this writing, not too far from Berkeley, just across the bridge, in San Francisco’s Mission District, they line up every Tuesday for the $1.99 special at Popeye’s Fried Chicken. They don’t stand in the street waiting for forty-five minutes to an hour because it’s particularly healthy chicken, or organic chicken, or conscientiously raised chicken—or even good chicken. They do it because it’s three fucking pieces for a dollar ninety-nine. Unless we respect that reality, Alice? We’re lost.

I remember well, when I was eleven and twelve years old, demonstrating against the war in Vietnam. My dad and I would travel to Washington. Later, my friends and I would march in New York. And what left a powerful impression in my mind, a lesson worth remembering, was how deeply and instinctively the construction workers, the cops and firemen—the very people whose families were most likely to be affected by the war—how they hated us. The message was lost—coming as it did from what they saw (rightly) as a bunch of overprivileged college kids, whose mommies and daddies were footing the bill for educations these folks would unlikely to ever be able to afford for their own kids. Here were these loud, self-absorbed ideologues who looked unlike anyone from their world and who lived nothing like them—but who had no problem talking down to them at every opportunity about the problems of the “working classes”—usually from the steps of Columbia University. The actual “working classes” we were shouting at knew what work was—every time they rolled into bed at night and woke up the next day. Who were these seemingly unemployed, hairy, pot-smoking freaks with their compliant girlfriends and their big talk about the Means of Production? What production? These cocksuckers didn’t produce anything!

Thus, a perfectly good message got lost with the messenger.

In the same way, having Alice Waters on your side of the argument is like having Alec Baldwin or Barbra Streisand endorse your candidate (a feeling I know all too well). You may agree with everything they say, but you wish they’d just shut the fuck up. No independent voter, disenchanted with the Republicans but struggling to pay his bills, wants to hear about what he should be doing or whom he should be voting for from some spectacularly wealthy “artiste” who lives in a compound in Hollywood—far from the pain and daily toil of ordinary Americans.

There is no better example of a counterproductive exercise in advocacy than Alice’s recent appearance on 60 Minutes. Introduced by a shockingly lazy and credulous Leslie Stahl as the “Mother of Slow Food” (a provably false assertion that thirty seconds of Googling would have put to rest), St. Alice of Berkeley was depicted floating ethereally above the fray as she grazed through an expensive greenmarket, pontificating dreamily about the joys of local produce and sustainable, socially conscientious eating.

Then she chose to cook Leslie a single egg over a roaring wood fire in her Berkeley home. I don’t know about you, but burning up a couple of cords of firewood for a single fucking egg doesn’t exactly send a message of sustainability to me. I believe the restrictions on wood fires are, in fact, particularly restrictive in Berkeley. I know I can’t have one in Manhattan without a spectacularly expensive combination of bafflers, catalytic converters, filters, and exhaust system, as well as the permits and legal work that one would need before installing them. They’re sensitive about such things in Berkeley—what with half the world’s carbon emissions said to come from wood fires and all. If Alice is cooking eggs like that every morning with her oatmeal and fresh-squeezed orange juice, her neighbors are enjoying the secondhand equivalent of a pack of Pall Malls.

Later in the program, when the action moved over to Chez Panisse, Alice, continuing to fetishize “local” produce, proudly commented on a delivery of brightly colored vegetables from “Chino Farms.” Here, her argument was undercut somewhat by the fact that Chino Farms—last time I looked, anyway, is in San Diego. That’s a nearly twelve-hour drive by truck to Chez Panisse—or an hour or so on a jet plane. Exactly how “local” or “sustainable” is that?

But then, this is kind of par for the course. What’s okay for Alice is…well…different…than what’s okay for you. That was certainly the unmissable (by anyone but Stahl) message of the 60 Minutes segment.

Examine the case of the series of dinners Alice threw in Washington, DC, to celebrate the Obama inauguration. Promoted in the press as an exemplary series of “small” affairs celebrating her sustainable, locavorian values, the thing mushroomed into a five-hundred-dollar-a-plate clusterfuck. In spite of the fact that Washington, DC, has plenty of excellent chefs and cooks of its own, Alice flew in well-known chefs, their crews, and (presumably) many of the ingredients they’d need from all over the country. How much hydrocarbon was released into the atmosphere bringing in these outsiders (clearly better than the local yokels, it was implied) will never be known. But one imagines that the cooks could have been sourced locally with little difficulty.

It’s unfair and nitpicking, but it’s irresistible for me not to point out one particular magic moment at a meal Alice threw with chef Tom Colicchio and cookbook author Joan Nathan. At one point, after taking a bite of food, Nathan started to choke. Waters’s reaction was to charge out into the dining room and inquire if “anyone knew the Heimlich maneuver.” Now, Chez Panisse has been open since 1971, one of the longest-running restaurant successes in America. Alice, it was my understanding, was the “executive chef,” a title that, if nothing else, implies spending a fair amount of your adult life in proximity to the “choking victim” sign ubiquitous (and mandated by law) in every professional kitchen. There’s not an American chef alive who doesn’t have that diagram imprinted on his or her brain. ’Cept’n Alice.

Tom Colicchio, who also has seen more than his share of television studios, certainly knew what to do. He stepped right up, placed his fist in the appropriate area, and dislodged the obstruction, thus saving Ms. Nathan’s life.

Which leads one to the question: Is Alice even a chef? Was she ever a chef—in any conventional sense of that word? I, for one, after reading all the accounts, official and unofficial, of Alice’s career and the history of Chez Panisse, can’t find a single supporting source to verify that she was ever a chef. And yet, year after year, she is described adoringly as such by people who know better.

And if she’s not a chef…well then, who is she? And why is she allowed to annoy me? Why do I listen to her? Why do I care?

There it is again. That faint, mellifluous voice in my head, telling me, “Alice is right.”

Alice…is riiiiight…about…everything…

Granted, this is the same voice that once compelled me to sit repeatedly, for hours at a time, in crowded halls that reeked of poor-quality Mexican weed, watching Hot Tuna. Actually, if the voice sounds like anybody, it’s David Crosby singing “Almost Cut My Hair” (a song about which I am still, in some secret place, uncontrollably sentimental). The voice persists. It tells me, “Fuck reality, man—embrace the Dream. Let your freak flag fly…”

Just because the counterculture, the “revolution,” all those ’60s hopes and dreams were corrupted, co-opted, and eventually crushed by the overpowering weight and impermeability of “the system”—as we should have known they always would be—that doesn’t mean it wasn’t, at least for a while, sometimes, a beautiful thing, right? Something got better for all that, right? I can’t think now what, exactly, but I’m sure the world improved in some way in spite of all the nonsense and self-indulgence. In spite of the way things turned out.

LSD sure raised my consciousness a bit. There’s no doubt that it made me think about the world from perspectives I might otherwise never have visited. From that first barrel of “Purple Haze,” the opening bars of “Court of the Crimson King,” I’m pretty sure I achieved enlightenment of a sort. That and a few records are what I got out of the ’60s. So, maybe LSD is a good metaphor for Alice. I may not want any now—but I’m glad she was around. And I may even be slightly better for the experience.

I’m constantly having an argument with Alice in my head, an ongoing conversation/disagreement—and she always wins. Just as in life. When I met her for a panel discussion a while back, I was loaded for bear. I’d reread her biographies, consulted contemporaneous accounts, tracked down every silly thing she’s ever said, briefed myself for a showdown.

But then, there she was, a nice old lady with (literally) an armload of produce and an expression that could only be described as serene…She floated across the room, clasped my hand between both of hers, smiled warmly, and I knew then that I could never pull the trigger.

Maybe Alice’s dream is what’s important. Maybe it doesn’t matter whether that dream leads anywhere beyond where we already are—or even if it leads, eventually, to a bad place. That can hardly negate the beauty of the original idea.

So, maybe the big winner, who gets to scoop up the gold at the end of Alice’s rainbow, turns out to be Whole Foods, with their fifty-odd checkout counters and their sanctimony at any price. The bad guys always win in the end, right? She can’t have seen that coming.

If I think about Alice Waters in this fashion, it becomes much less painful.

Who cares how “great” Chez Panisse is now? Or whether or not Alice Waters was ever a “chef” in the conventional sense of that word? Looking back at that Golden Time in Berkeley, it matters not at all who was responsible for the Revolution or in what measure. If the true genius who created what we came to know as California and then New American, or Seasonal Regional, who changed menus and dining as we know it forever, was Alice or Jeremiah Tower—or Joe Baum, years earlier. Does. Not. Matter.

What we do know is that whatever happened, it “happened,” undeniably caught on, and finally exploded out of Alice’s restaurant. She created a space where something really really important came together, involving some very talented, very creative people—who in any other setting or combination would probably not have flown so far and so high. Hers was a virtual cradle of revolution. As far as map coordinates go, there’s little doubt of that.

What is also certain is that Alice appreciated the food of France—and what it might mean to us—in a way that few others did at the time. And she applied that passion in ways that no one in America had previously considered. In those days, when the Dream was new and Chez Panisse was just starting up, it was democratic, inclusive, dysfunctional, and ludicrously, admirably, unprofitable. Had someone with any business sense at all attempted to do what Alice was trying to do, it never would have happened. Surely, this was a very fine and good thing.

Alice thinks what we eat is important. So do I. She thinks it’s the most important thing in the world. I do not. But I’m quite sure that we both have made major decisions in our lives, gained and lost friends, based on what’s to eat.

Alice thinks farmers should make more money—growing stuff that’s both good-tasting and good for us. Who could be against that? I like farms. So I don’t want to work on one. I doubt very much that Alice does either. So we have that in common, too.

She thinks, as I do, that we should be aware of what’s good in our own backyards and support those things—by eating them, and growing more of them. I’m with her, to a point. But then I don’t have a backyard.

Strikingly, she is, and always has been, a carnivore. There is no question as to her position on foie gras. For decades, in the middle of Berkeley, she has unapologetically championed the use of animal flesh as food rather than as something that should someday win the right to vote. In this respect, being blissfully out of touch with what’s going on around her has served her well.

In fact, it’s Alice’s very hypocrisy that belies her true virtues. Because what’s truly wonderful about Alice is that she is, first and foremost, a sensualist. When you see Alice preaching about how you should be eating local—while nibbling on sea urchin roe from Hokkaido or foie gras from Gascony—at least you know she really appreciates the good stuff. It may be strategically foolish and inappropriate and bad for her argument to be seen cooking a fresh-laid organic egg over an open fire for Leslie Stahl—but I’ll bet it tasted fucking delicious.

What makes Alice Waters such a compelling character is her infectious enthusiasm for pleasure. She’s made lust, greed, hunger, self-gratification, and fetishism look good. When Alice shows you a bunch of radishes, you fucking want them. Where have those radishes been all my life? I need them!

Who cares if she knows the Heimlich maneuver? Did Gandhi know the Heimlich maneuver? Does Bono?

And skimming over the pages of a recent biography, I see there is the oft-cited charge that Alice has made a career of taking credit for the work of others.

To which I’d reluctantly have to ask: Exactly which chefs—to one extent or another—haven’t done that? How could the batty hippie chick have really been responsible for such an important era in gastronomy, is the implied question. Yet, so many male chefs have climbed or leaped to the top over the smashed bodies of subordinates and peers—without accruing fault or foul. The question lingers—and, along with it, I gather, some animus—because Alice survived and prospered where many of her original hippie contemporaries did not. She had the temerity to make money eventually. To figure out, or at least accept, that the Dream could not grow, much less survive, in a commune.

If you’re still looking to find “the True Genius behind the Whole Thing”—examining old menus at Chez Panisse, pre-Tower and post-Tower, for instance—you may as well be scrutinizing blurry photographs of the grassy knoll. There is, as with the Kennedy assassination, a case to be made for a second shooter. But spend too long looking and, in the end, you miss the point entirely.

Alice Waters is still here. Jeremiah Tower is not.

Alice is widely known—and will probably always be known—as the “Mother of Slow Food.” Jeremiah Tower allowed himself to become a footnote to history.

And history, as they say, will always be written by the victors.