by Ann Simms

In the summer of 1969, Alice Waters and a friend were traveling across the plains of central Anatolia in a tiny, beat-up Morris Minor. Waters had just completed her coursework at the Montessori Institute in London, where she was preparing to become a high school teacher. This trip to Turkey, along with the next year she would spend restaurant hopping in France, was to be her last hurrah before launching a lifelong career in education.

Things didn’t go exactly as planned. One evening, the traveling companions pitched their tent near a flock of goats. The next morning, Waters woke to find a small token of charity that changed her perspective forever.

“Somebody had put a bowl of fresh goat’s milk under the flap of our tent,” she recalls, sitting at a window table last month at her Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse. She remembers being deeply affected by this anonymous gift, as well as by the culinary savories she sampled in France. So she put her love of teaching on the back burner in favor of her passion for food and hospitality. She started in 1971 at a simmer, with $10,000 borrowed from her father (the Bank of America refused her application for a loan because she had no previous experience as a restaurant owner) and a plan to open a “simple, real food” restaurant for an intimate clientele of family and friends. It wasn’t long, however, before the simmer heated up to a rolling boil, with celebrity patrons from Bill Clinton to the Dalai Lama becoming regulars.

Chez Panisse, named after a character in a 1930s trilogy of movies by Marcel Pagnol, has become known for the quality of its ingredients, its dedication to paying farmers a living wage, and its celebration of seasonal fruits and vegetables. In addition to serving food with a distinctly French flair (for its 35th birthday on August 28 of this year, Waters served a classic Provençal fish and shellfish stew with saffron, wild fennel and rouille), the restaurant is also famous for its almost shocking simplicity. (Remarkably, dessert on the prix fixe menu was once a single peach.) The restaurant, now considered one of the nation’s finest, was recently rated by Michelin, the infamous French food rating system that has led at least one chef to commit suicide over rumors that he might be losing his ranking. Upon receiving only one out of a possible three stars, Waters said, “You know, I’ve always wanted a little one-star restaurant. When I was in France, they were the ones I loved the most.”

The “Queen of California Cuisine” is now settling into her fifties with the irreverent youthfulness of a Berkeley baby boomer. She has a petite figure, wears her dark hair in a pixie style, and delivers her words with unaffected precision and an easy-going smile. When she reflects on her travels in Turkey, she glances out the window. “We never saw who put the milk there,” she says, lifting an open palm in the air. “[It was probably] some shepherd out there with his goat herd, [but we] never saw that.”

It wasn’t until 1996 that Waters realized that she didn’t have to choose between food and education, and she established the Chez Panisse Foundation, a nonprofit organization with the sole purpose of educating children about food, health and the environment. “We started [the foundation] largely out of concern that young people increasingly are isolated from the land and deprived of the joys and responsibilities it teaches,” Waters explains. “A lot of people who come to eat at Chez Panisse really understand the relationship of agriculture and culture. We wanted to offer them a way to contribute to projects that promote that understanding, especially among children.”

For the first course, Waters focused a discerning eye on an ugly, unused parking lot on the campus of Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, not far from Chez Panisse. “The school didn’t look so good,” Waters explained at a conference about school gardens. “In fact, it almost looked abandoned. I would see the graffiti on the windows and the burnt-out grass, and I would wonder what happened. Who was using this school? Who was taking care of it?”

After a productive tête-à-tête with the school’s then principal, Neil Smith, Waters got the go-ahead to repave the lot with 100 pounds of fresh compost and one acre’s worth of fruit trees, vegetables, herbs and ornamentals. Dubbed the “Edible Schoolyard,” this organic garden became the outdoor counterpart to an indoor kitchen classroom that was converted from an unused cafeteria. In the kitchen, students eat the fruits and veggies they sow, harvest, and bake themselves.

The Edible Schoolyard’s botany and culinary classes are no slacker electives. Rather, they’re fully integrated into the school’s traditional academic curriculum. Students learn about photosynthesis by observing plant leaves in the garden as well as by studying chemical formulas in their textbooks. In the indoor kitchen classroom, students discover the history and concept of food preservation during the Neolithic period, as they taste the very grains that have been harvested for millennia.

After getting their hands dirty in the garden and then cleaning them up for work in the kitchen, students record their observations in a journal. This exercise gives the kids a chance to process what they’ve done. The written track record also gives educators a better chance to monitor learning and development. Mati, a student at King, describes in her journal a hike through the garden designed to nourish all five senses. “I followed the directions and the cards,” she wrote. “Some of them said to taste and I tasted. And I really liked the Golden Raspberry. I was hooked on them! I could not leave! I saw some cards that said to smell stuff so I did. I liked to smell the lavender.”

According to a two-year study of the Edible Schoolyard by J. Michael Murphy, an associate professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, this program is both shrinking students’ waistlines and increasing their understanding of food and the environment. Murphy observed that when middle school students inlarge urban communities are given the opportunity to learn about ecology in a real-world context, “they are more enthusiastic about attending school, make better grades, eat healthier food due to wiser food choices, and become more knowledgeable about natural processes.” Not only that, but the more students learn about the ecosystem, the more fruits and vegetables they’re likely to eat. “Teaching students about where food comes from and how it is prepared,” said Murphy, “may be an important contributor to overall diet change.”

Beyond the raw data is living proof that some students are willingly turning their attention from Cheetos to chickpeas. Given the staggering popularity of junk food, one might suppose that the success of the Edible Schoolyard does not depend upon kids’ naturally sophisticated palates or any sort of “hidden potential” as food connoisseurs that was tragically quashed the moment they first raised a Dorito to their lips.

“We could have Chez Panisse food in the cafeteria and the kids wouldn’t eat it,” says Marsha Guerrero, the executive director at the Edible Schoolyard. The key, she says, is learning how to grow the very fruits and vegetables they reject to at the family dinner table. Guerrero cites calls from pleasantly bemused parents who want to verify that their kale- and pumpkin-hating children really ate kale and pumpkin as proof that their strategy actually works. “This may sound like a cliché by now, but it’s true,” said Guerrero. “If they grow it, they’ll eat it.”

Even if the sowed schoolyard concept has yet to become an integral part of the nation’s food culture, it is beginning to catch on. For starters, in Berkeley virtually every public school already boasts a garden-kitchen combo. And each year, more than 1,000 educators, health professionals, community advocates and legislators visit the Edible Schoolyard, taking meticulous notes that, with any luck, will translate into their very own Edible Eden. In California alone, there are now an estimated 3,000 school gardens. And across the country, even in colder climates, where most gardens hibernate during the winter months, schools are using greenhouses and root cellars to cultivate their crops.

“[They don’t all] have to look as nice as this,” says Guerrero, sitting on a bale of hay in the “Ramada,” a round open-air structure where gardening classes typically meet. Above her head, on a trellis, buxom kiwis hang heavy on the vine. At her feet a plot of earth hosts a riot of dahlias, columbines, and carnations. “It can be planter boxes for crying out loud. We just got really lucky.”

A garden of epic proportions isn’t all the Chez Panisse Foundation has to feel lucky about. They also have an all-star cast of board members, including celebrated entertainers, writers, and food activists. Mikhail Baryshnikov, Billy Collins, Eric Schlosser, Meryl Streep, and Alice Walker are just a few of the foundation’s closest friends. With roughly 30 board members, the Foundation spends $1,000,000 annually on programming and grants, much of which goes toward the Edible Schoolyard.

One of the foundation’s upcoming programs is the replication of the Edible Schoolyard at the Samuel J. Green Charter School in New Orleans, which will cost at least $500,000 to launch. “We hope to renew New Orleans one okra plant and one child at a time,” says principal Tony Recasner. Of the 400 children in grades K-8 at Green, 99 percent are African-American, 75 percent are from single-parent homes and the vast majority qualify for the federal free-lunch program.

One of the foundation’s board members is Wendell Berry, whose oft-quoted phrase, “eating is an agricultural act,” comes close to Waters’ own vision. “To eat is to understand the consequences,” she says. For Waters, while the act of eating takes place at the table, the concept of eating goes way back to the farm on which the food was made.

“I eat a piece of bread knowing that the wheat is produced in a way that is sustainable, that the starter for the bread and the salt are produced in a way that is sustainable, and [that] the people that are producing these products are being paid a living wage. The values of the food have to be understood to make that food real food and nourishing food.”

Waters is part of the “slow food” movement, initiated by Carlo Petrini in 1986 when he championed an effort against the building of a McDonald’s near the Spanish Steps in Rome. “The protesters, whom Carlo armed with bowls of penne, defiantly and deliciously stated their case against the global standardization of the world’s food,” wrote Waters in the forward to Petrini’s collection of essays entitled Slow Food: The Case for Taste. Referred to by some as the “culinary wing” of the anti-globalization movement, Slow Food aims to combat the proliferation of fast food and preserve cultural cuisines as well as their associated food plants, domestic animals, and farming technologies.

These are the values that the Edible Schoolyard hopes to impress upon children. It won’t be easy. With the junk food industry pouring cash into advertising directed toward children, the Edible Schoolyard has its work cut out for it. But Waters is determined. “Once you realize that there’s no mushrooms in the schools, and no electricity to plug the refrigerator into, people will begin to wake up to the neglect and maybe we can make a change.”

Change is indeed happening at the Edible Schoolyard. Classes are over for the day and the diffused afternoon light is intensifying the green of the leaves in the garden. Two eighth-grade girls are wandering around the produce beds, making one last round before walking home. The Edible Schoolyard’s informal mascot, a little ink-black chick named “Fishy,” is following nervously in their wake, pecking at grubs and fallen berries. One girl stops beneath a mulberry tree, its branches spangled with dark fruits. She puts Fishy on top of her head to see if the chick will eat directly from the branches. But Fishy simply tucks in her wings and settles into the girl’s hair. The other girl joins the funny-looking duo, picks the blackest berry from the tree and hands it to her friend. The girl with the bird on her head takes the fruit and places it on her tongue. The moment her mouth closes, her eyes close, too.

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For more information visit Edible Schoolyard, and listen to a message from Alice Waters on how to transform school lunches.