When the influential chef and natural foods advocate Alice Waters shows up on the National Mall this summer, she'll tend to artichokes, tomatoes and mesclun (greens and herbs). No, the founder of the legendary Berkeley, California, restaurant Chez Panisse hasn't taken a groundskeeper gig. She's participating in the Folklife Festival's Food Culture USA exhibit, where Smithsonian horticulturists are planting a temporary version of Waters' Edible Schoolyard. She started the garden-centric educational program at a Berkeley middle school about a decade ago to teach young people how food gets to the table—and how to eat better. Smithsonian spoke with the dinner-table diva this spring.
You say you can get any child to eat Swiss chard. That really happens?
You should see, after six weeks or so, they're all eating salad. It's a wonderful thing.
And they're not making faces?
No, because they were involved in the whole process. They have a kind of pride in it. They've made the vinaigrette themselves, they've tossed the salad. They've served their friends, they want to know what they think of it, they eat it themselves.
Can a food-based curriculum fill in for parents who can't—or don't—sit down for regular meals with their kids?
That's part of the idea. Parents aren't eating with their children anymore. They aren't communicating a whole sense of our culture around the dinner table, the place where we become civilized. We need to learn about the relationship of food to agriculture and food to culture.
What happens when kids learn to see that connection?
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