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Indianapolis Museum of Art
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World-class chef, "eat local" advocate, and food educator Alice Waters visits the Indianapolis Museum of Art and The Toby to ignite a conversation about learning, creative living, health, and sustainability. As the founder of the Edible Schoolyard garden project in which students grow and prepare their own food, Waters shares her vision for “a revolution in public education…When sustainability becomes the lens through which they see the world.” Savor Alice’s message of the pleasure, beauty, and power of food.
Please join me in thanking and welcoming Alice Waters.
[Applause]
Thank you for the beautiful introduction and for inviting me to this really amazing museum. I had a special tour this afternoon
and I'm just really impressed. I just think that if we sell all the books, if the book store sells all the books that I sign today,
that something's going to be growing here, and some people are going to be cooking here, in very interesting, very delicious ways.
Well, one of the reasons that I accepted this generous invitation is because, in my imagination, Indianapolis is a kind of mythical American city. A place that I've never actually visited and some place that
I don't know anything about but it's a place that's defined in my mind by one, big, oversimplified association.
It's the idea that Indianapolis equals speed and, of course, that speed represents progress,
it may have reached its highest point of development in fast food. So, I thought it would be fitting to come to Indianapolis
as a spokesman for slow food and slow food values, but what's the difference and is there a difference?
I'm reminded of a story about a snail and a turtle, and deep in the forest, a snail and a turtle had a terrible collision
and it was a horrible accident and there were lots of injuries and so the ambulance comes and takes the snail to the emergency room and the doctor asks the snail,
"What happened?" and the snail is sort of drifting in and out of consciousness and says, "I don't know, doctor, it all happened so fast."
So, I just thought I have to explain what I mean about slow food. Well, for one thing, as many of you know, slow food is an
international movement founded by my friend, Carlo Petrini and it has a snail for a logo and in 1996,
sorry 1986, when a McDonald's franchise opened right at the base of the Spanish steps in Rome on a beautiful
Baroque Piazza di Spagna, Carlo made headlines by organizing a protest and you may remember the famous French protest
of the McDonald's a few years later when this angry organic farmer named, Jose Bove drove his tractor
right into the McDonald's and smashed it up. But, the French and the Italians are not the same and when Carlo organized his protest,
it was completely peaceful. He got a bunch of grandmothers to make slow-cooked Bolognese sauce and the crowd
marched by the new McDonald's holding up not just placards, but bowls of fresh penne and his hope was to convince people
that we have to preserve traditional food and everything it brings into our lives.
Well, Carlo has been pretty successful in getting his message across, but the best he could do in Rome was to get McDonald's to take down the golden arches
in front of the restaurant. So, the Romans and the tourists can still buy those Big Macs, but at least the baroque splendor of that piazza
isn't marred by those ugly neon arches. Well, in the year since it was founded, Carlo's Slow Food international
has become a grass roots organization and you said, it was in 141 countries and I thought it was only in 131,
but it has over a one hundred thousand members and they are all devoted to combating fast food, fast food values, and the fast food
economy and the damage they do to our bodies, to our families, and to our communities.
Well, I'll get back to fast food in a moment, but now I'm going to give you Carlo's prescription for curing what ails us.
Quality food, by which he means food that is good, clean, and fair. By clean, he means, of course, no pesticides,
no artificial preservatives, no growth hormones, no animal feeds given to the livestock, in a word "natural."
But, I'm not here to talk about that. Nor, to be honest, am I here to talk about fair by which Carlo means a form of
social justice; paying fair wages to farm workers, and fair prices to all of the farmers.
What I want to talk to you tonight about is the good, as in good food and the positive ripples it can send through families and communities.
Good food has been my life's work. What I mean by good is pretty straight forward, fruits and vegetables
that are seasonal and ripe and so fresh that they awaken your senses. Delicious meals cooked with care and enjoyed around the family with friends.
In my view, there is nothing more central to our humanity or to the health of our society. Bad food by contrast; industrial food,
fast food is an assault and we must and can resist it together. I came to this philosophy on my own
and maybe you know this story but I thought it would be really important for me to go back sort of to my beginnings because I grew up
as a rather average kid in New Jersey in the 1950s. My father did plant a victory garden in our backyard because, as you probably know,
during World War II, the government actually encouraged families to grow food for their tables as part of the war effort
and one 4th of July, for a costume contest, my mother dressed me up as a queen of the garden and I had a skirt of asparagus
and a lettuce top and bracelets that had peppers, bell peppers and I had a wreath of strawberries on my head,
and I won first prize. But it was much later when I was traveling in Europe that I really started paying attention to eating with all of my senses.
I spent my junior year of college in Paris. I'm a little ashamed to report that I hardly ever attended courses that year. My friend, Sara and I
were too busy eating. We started out at the self-service cafe because we were afraid to speak French and we thought we found things there that I have never tasted before,
things like yogurt, pate, and oysters. Eventually, I got up my courage and started hanging out with French students who took a critical approach
to food as a matter of course. For the first time, I met people who thought of good food as an indispensable part of life.
Every day was punctuated by food related decisions. It went without saying, we had to get to the bakery early, so you could get the hot bread
and you wanted maybe an hour or so in the afternoon to sit in the cafe and enjoy a coffee with friends. But the biggest surprise
was that my new French friends not only bought produce that was in season, because that's when it was the least expensive and best tasting,
but they spent time cooking. Eating together was the most important ritual of their lives, a crucial and nonnegotiable
time when the flavors and the smells of roasting chicken and sizzling garlic, the crunch of crusty bread and the taste of local wine
teased out their most passionate ideas and feelings. I had never thought about food so seriously before and
I certainly had never thought about pleasure that way. Nor was any of this an intellectual exercise, I was just
absorbed in all of these lessons by living them and I began to feel this intimate connection between eating good food and
living a truly good life. After college, I traveled to Turkey and I had another awakening, this time about food and hospitality.
To be precise, about the no questions asked, so totally accepting and generous sharing that seems to come so naturally from people
who live close to the land. While I was camping, one time, in Turkey with a group of friends, I woke up in the morning
and found that somebody had lifted the flap and put in little bowl of warm goats milk; while we had had been sleeping.
They simply shared the best of what they have. I didn't know then, of course, that these experiences of food and hospitality
would shape the rest of my life. From Turkey, we went to Corfu, where I lived for a while on practically nothing, very simply watching the sun
come up and the moon go down over the sea, and we ate fish caught from that sea, and we picked fruit from the trees.
There was a sense of a immediacy and aliveness about the food. It was so clearly part of the natural rhythms of the island,
spending my days and nights there and eating and living so close to the earth, I felt my whole life, beginning to make sense.
Looking back now, I understand why. I was learning that something as simple as food
you can eat, can put you directly in harmony with the natural world. Not to long after my dreamy season in Corfu,
I moved back to Berkeley and I started Chez Panisse. When I first opened the restaurant, in 1971, all I wanted was to recreate the food
and the hospitality that I had enjoyed so much abroad. A place where my family and friends could gather, eat great food and talk about politics;
after all, I grew up in Berkeley in the '60s. So, central to that mission was the job of waking up the senses
of every one of those diners. I wanted our customers to feel what I had felt when I was drinking that goat's milk. I wanted to sort of peel
back the alienation people suffer when they subsist on food that has been mass produced in distant factories and sold to them
in plastic wrap. I wanted to give people the experience of tasting a real tomato for the first time. I wanted to show lawyers,
teachers, and parents how to savor the miracle of a midsummer peach. Fairly quickly, however, I learnt that
in order to get the tomatoes and the peaches, that were good enough, I would have to reach out to the producers, to the farmers, to the dairymen and all the ranchers.
I wasn't being driven by a philosophy, back then. I wasn't thinking about the sustainability or ecology.
I was only looking for flavor. I planted a lettuce garden in my backyard because you simply couldn't find good lettuces in those days
and I began sniffing around the country roads, pleading with small growers to grow those Blenheim apricots
and the tender young peas and all the other foods I wanted to serve at Chez Panisse. I knew that without them, I wouldn't be able to show people
that food can be an authentic form of sustenance and not just fuel. A mealy tough skinned tomato
will never teach anybody about food as spiritual substance, because a mealy tough skin tomato is nothing of the sort
but if you spice up an Early Girl tomato in California in about mid-September and you just drizzle on a little olive oil
and a sprinkle of salt, you're in business, or at least Chez Panisse was. There were times when I'd peek out
of the restaurant's kitchen and look around the room to see how my project was going and one of the biggest surprises was always how effectively good food does the job.
Night after night I watch stressed-out, distracted diners transform into happy eaters, lost in great conversation.
The ripple effects of good food went all around the dining room and to this day, Chez Panisse has never done any advertising.
Our customers just tell their friends and they tell their neighbors about this good place and thank goodness the restaurant fills up and it's stayed that way for all these years.
What's more, in the midst of all that good eating and all those good times, we created a deeply integrated web of producers caring for the land
and a new economy, this is very important, dedicated to good and sustainable food and even a new way
of feeding and teaching school children. These days, of course, I depend on my chefs to keep nourishing our customers,
while I focus on sending the positive ripples of good food out here in Indiana.
And I am not taking about franchising Chez Panisse or granting new products. I'm talking really about bringing the experience
and values of truly healthful and delicious food to everyone, beginning with the school children. And, most exciting,
there is a ground swell of popular support right now. You probably all here in this room, you probably know that Wal-Mart
of course, is selling organic food and clothing, they have been doing it for a couple of years but it's so great to know that we are multiplying those farmer's;
markets geometrically. In about 1990, there were about nineteen hundred
farmers' markets in the United States, and now they are way over five thousand and that doesn't count any of those little roadside stands.
We're at a really amazing moment in history, and I'm thinking, of course, to our new presidential administration
among other things has the opportunity to appoint a Secretary of Agriculture who supports a greener, more diversified, and more
sustainable agriculture. And I'm thinking, too, that now it's time to implement a plan that I have been lobbying for nearly
twenty years. Now don't you think it would be great if the White House had a victory garden, an organic vegetable garden, right front
and center on the lawn?
[Applause]
This is not without precedet of course, John Adams and Franklin D. Roosevelt during the war had such a garden, when they lived there, and imagine what a symbol it would be,
what a message it would be to send to the world if the president were giving his press conferences right there
between the little orchard and the compost heap. [Laughter] I can see it...I can see it...
But the change I'm most interested in, is a national commitment to edible education. I believe in using students,
the experience of growing their own food in a school garden, preparing it in a classroom and enjoying it around the table.
Making good food the birthright of every American will require a lot of hard work and sacrifice and
a commitment to paying for it, but good food belongs on every American table and not in just fine restaurants.
Once we put it back there, I am going to go right back to the kitchen and start cooking again, but right now it's really important,
really, really important that we talk about food in this particular way. It's eating together as one of the oldest,
basically, most basic and frankly the most conservative ideas there is. This isn't anything new that we are talking about.
It's only resurfacing now because food that's truly good has become such a rarity in American life.
The author Eric Schlosser, one of my heroes and probably yours has pointed out that we live in Fast Food Nation.
Americans spend more money on fast food than on higher education and I heard today an alarming statistic about Indianapolis
that 75 percent of the restaurants in this town are chains, where we think of course of chickens as nuggets, children do.
This morning when I spoke to the children at the school, and I asked them where their food came from, and they said, "It's from the store."
It took them a long time to, sort of, get to the farm. But we have been indoctrinated
to really believe that it's not important where our food comes from and that a family meal could actually consist of hitting the drive-thru
and eating a hamburger, fries and a shake in the car. Fast food has become our dominant cuisine, our peasant cooking if you will,
of America and perhaps it's the dominant cultural force as well and we buy fast food because it's available,
easy, familiar and almost cheap. I say almost because as you know, fast food and fast food values have huge hidden costs.
As many as 85 percent of American families don't sit down regularly and eat dinner together, only 15 percent do
and a whole country suffers. Studies have shown that children who eat together with their families have better language skills, better grades,
lower risk of drinking and smoking and abusing drugs and children who don't eat dinner together with their families are less healthy,
less literate and less happy. Now that American obsession we speak, too busy to cook and too busy to sit down and eat together,
reminds me of a funny little essay that Adam Gopnik wrote about his daughter, Olivia, and their imaginary friend Charley Ravioli.
Charley Ravioli was always too busy to play with Olivia, always rushing around to meetings and hopping in cabs, an imagined fact
with which Adam and his wife found deeply depressing. Adam's sister, a developmental psychologist, found this distressing too, and she suggested
that Olivia and Ravioli and the whole Adam clan decamp to California to live a slower life and to tend an organic garden.
But I digress. The point is, and I think we can all agree, we don't want life to be so fast that our children dream up imaginary
friends too busy to play with them. Nor do we want children to eat in such a fast and harried manner that they run the risk
of being at once malnourished and obese. What's more, fast food and fast food values
don't just happen in restaurants along freeways. The fast food mentality has infiltrated
every grocery store in this country, and I dare say, even health food stores. My good friend and neighbor Michael Pollan, who I hear came to Indianapolis
not long ago has been writing about the rise of what he calls nutritionism brought on by the food manufacturers who constantly have new products
to sell and also by the journalists who are always looking for stories. Well, Michael defines nutritionism as the widely shared
and unexamined assumption that the key to understanding food is the nutrient. Think of the so-called essential vitamins and minerals
in every box of Fruit Loops. The zero-carb tortillas and the frozen dinners four to five with omega-3 fatty acids.
The implication, of course, is the whole point of eating is bodily health but all we need to do, all we need from food is a particular mix
of calories and compounds. Pleasure and socializing don't figure and they should. We have heard about the so called French paradox.
The French eat fois gras and creme brulee and we live on Snackwells and Lean Cuisine and yet, much to our astonishment,
they live longer. Of course, that's changing in France unfortunately, because, of course, they are starting to eat like us
but that's another story. I don't want you to think that I'm elitist here, down on the easy targets like children's
cereals and McDonald's. I see these food problems everywhere, even in our finest institutions
and I've told this story many times that I think of it so often because it was when I was taking my daughter to go to school
at The Mountain, The Mountain School in Vermont and she was going away from home for the first time and I was a little traumatized by it,
even though that school is a wonderful place with a whole garden that's integrated into the curriculum.
But, I was on my way back home and I went to New York City and I ate some wonderful meals with my old friends and I walked around Central Park
and then I went over to the Museum of Natural History. And, as you know, it's a remarkable piece of Romanesque revival architecture.
It's an amazing place and I remember going in from New Jersey as a child to San Francisco and I was swept away by the soaring spaces
and all the dinosaurs, and the dioramas celebrating the family of man.
And, as an adult, I am happy to say the museum still feels full of wonder. The whole world on display.
The entire animal kingdom, rare Japanese textiles, and ancient African masks and it's a dazzling monument to everything ambitious
and awe inspiring about the human spirit and then I walked into the museum cafe.
Suddenly, my expansive feeling shriveled up. I just don't understand how people come into a marvelous museum
and open themselves up to everything great about being on earth, and then they turn around and allow themselves
to be fed in such an unmarvelous way. But, people were lining up there like robots and they were grabbing their plastic trays
and the room had that steamy water-logged hospital food smell. You know that smell.
You can see the precooked plastic pouches being microwaved and dumped onto plates and I started to wonder at this terrifically antiheroic
exhibit and then I left. I had to leave. Here everybody was celebrating what it was to be alive and yet in that same institution
that put together those great exhibits, seemed unable to conceive of much as anything more than to replenish our caloric needs and portion
sugar water down our throats. Since then, of course, they have done an upgrade, many institutions have done an upgrade, it looks better.
There are bowls of actual oranges and apples on the counter and it looks better, but I believe that
the food still expresses the fast food values. There's still essentially pizzas and sodas being sold at the Natural History Museum.
So, right now, my life is dedicated to making lunch in our public schools better than this.
To making it a true growing, learning, and interactive experience. It all started innocently enough
near my home in Berkeley at the Martin Luther King Middle Junior School, which serves a very diverse group of kids, about a 1,000 kids
at the school in sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. It's a school that I have passed on my way to Chez Panisse. Well, ten years ago,
it was covered with a dreary black top and the school cafeteria had been closed and replaced by a shack at the end of the parking lot,
that sold that pre-packaged, microwaved food and many people in the community were dismayed by the state of the food.
And together, we all convinced the enlightened principal that he should rip up that black top and plant an enormous garden, so that the students
could learn and cook from an edible school yard and as parents among you doubtlessly know, children love to help to cook and they love to help garden.
The great educational reformer John Dewey recognized this, so did Montessori and Waldorf. Clear back in 1909,
there was a California educator whose name was James Ralph Jewel and he wrote a booklet entitled "A Gardening Curriculum for the California Public Schools."
This was a real movement at the beginning of the last century. All right, the school yard at Martin Luther King with its one acre organic garden
and kitchen classroom began in 1996, with its students preparing meals from their own crop of mache, arugula, mustard greens, kale, beets and garlic.
Twelve years later, the garden and the kitchen are still going strong, just last week when I was there they were making a little stew with the Jacob's cattle,
a type of beans that they had dried from last year's harvest and they had kale and celery and they were pounding together savory and garlic
and making a little paste to put in the soup. They were making snacks, a couple of weeks ago, with empanadas and dolmas and sweet potato fries,
which they served in little hand-made, rolled-up cones. They learn about taste. They learn about nutrition. They learnt about ripeness, conservation,
composting, and respect. Best of all, recognizing that good food is the right of every child,
the Berkeley Board of Education voted to adopt the model of an edible education in every one of the city's public schools.
Ultimately, this might mean that we would feed nine thousand kids on sixteen campuses and legitimize a new way of thinking and teaching about food.
We want children to see that the decisions that they make are the most important of their lives. To see that eating is not
just about fueling up, that it isn't something to do on the cheap, as quickly as possible.
You know, I saw a bumper sticker and I tell this joke all the time to people because it is too good, a bumper sticker in the car;
"If I am what I eat, then I am fast, cheap, and easy."
Yeah, you know, it's really clever, it's funny, it is funny, but is fast, cheap, and easy what we want our kids to be?
Some might say, isn't it a fantasy? The dream of planting edible schoolyards across the country and teaching children in every grade the basics of eco-gastronomy,
and what I mean about eco-gastronomy is the way our relationship with food has an impact on every aspect of our life
and especially the environment. This is a tall order, but you know we have made these big changes before.
Fifty years ago we had a preview of today's obesity crisis and Kennedy's presidential council told us that our children
were not physically fit and we did something about it at great expense. Do you know, we put physical education into every school in America?
We built gyms, we built tracks, and we bought equipment, and we hired teachers at great expense and we made physical education
part of the core curriculum and the kids were graded on their performance. Now, very sadly of course
we are undoing all that work by cutting funding for recess and gym, but this is an idea
that can happen and in a country where nine million children over six are obese, we need physical education more than ever and we need that
the diet to be part of the curriculum.
We are already starting to see better food infiltrating the schools. You know, all over the country, at every level, we're beginning to reevaluate
the food services and we are talking about Yale at the beginning. When my daughter first went there, we went into the cafeteria together
and she looked at me and I looked at her and I said, "I don't think we can eat here, can we?" And she said, "No."
And so we headed over with all rest of the freshman parents, all three thousand of them, to meet the president and we were very late in line and my daughter was saying that
"Don't you say anything, don't you say anything to him," and I said "Well, I am not going to say a word" and we got there and his wife said to me,
"Aren't you Alice Waters?" and stopped the line right there and so I couldn't help myself.
And so, I said, "You know I'd really like to help you change the food here at Yale."
And very quickly, he was a little bit on automatic at that point, and he said "Okay, fine, yes why don't you come and see me in my office."
and so I stayed and I went to see him in his office and of course, he thought that I was going to come and cook for him at his house and I told him
of course that that's not what I had in mind, that I was talking about what he was going to do about the food he was serving to all the children,
all the ten thousand students at Yale and its kind of amazing what happened from that point. Fortunately, the chief financial officer
had been someone who lived in Connecticut and had a farm there, that had been paved over and his interest was really supporting
the small farmers of New Haven. And so the university, now we are talking six years later,
it has a thriving garden with over three hundred varieties of fruits and vegetables tended by two hundred student volunteers and the students at the
residential college with the greenest dining hall are the envy of all the other classmates. At one point, they were trading cards
to try to get in, you know false ID's. But the point here is not just to create token demonstration gardens
or even to upgrade the cafeteria meals with more local food. The point is to integrate food into the entire curriculum,
and to integrate the institution's food services into a sustainable and self-contained local economy.
Yale is large, a large enough university that its commitment to sustainability has made it possible for them to buy an entire tomato crop,
from all organic farms nearby, and they can them for the winter time use reviving a local canary
in the process, that's what can happen. Chez Panisse, you know, supports eighty-five people, two farms entirely and we only
serve five hundred people a day, just imagine, just multiply that out. If projects like this take root across the country, both education
and agriculture will be transformed. One out of every five Americans is in school and if all these students are eating lunch together,
eating local food, just imagine the change they could make.
Overtime, we would have a wholesome, affordable cuisine and we would restore the health of our nation.
Now, among Michael Pollan, so I am gonna get back to Michael, just this one little last thought, because he is so brilliant
and he has so many wonderful observations about food but the one that really struck me was when he said that
we have to get back to eating food, by food he means in its simplest most direct form, food that as he puts it are great
great grandmother would recognize as food, not your mother because even she came of age with industrialized food that's processed,
stripped of the nutrients and then resprayed with vitamins. Michael's own remedy for the national eating disorder is not complicated, as he puts it
"eat food, not too much, mostly plants". He also urges us to put food back into the context
of culture by eating within a traditional cuisine; French, Italian, or Japanese it doesn't matter. Humans have known for many thousands of years
how to eat well. We wouldn't have survived this long if we didn't know how to feed ourselves. And traditional cuisines carry a much needed
and sorely lacking guide about what to eat, how much to eat, with whom to eat, and how to make delicious food,
we have to go back there. But without any help from our traditional food culture or any education in schools, we are living at the mercy of the food scientist,
the marketers, and so-called health experts. You know Americans, are now understandingly lost.
Do you know, it's a wilderness out there? Seventeen thousand new products hitting the grocery stores every year.
Seventeen thousand! Is that possible?
Well, I'm going to get, just at the end, I want to get back to slowness. Slowness in
food as in life is a much overlooked virtue. The Czech novelist Milan Kundera could well
have been thinking about the Indianapolis 500 when he wrote "Speed is a form of ecstasy, the technical revolution has bestowed upon man."
But just as there is "a secret bond between speed and forgetting, there is also
a secret bond between slowness and memory."
America is in a fast food and fast eating crisis and we need to change this. Not through a daily pill
or by eating omega-3 eggs, but by focusing on the slow and the good. By drinking homemade
lemonade and eating fresh tortillas. Running our fingers over tender lettuces grown in school gardens
by children who are enlivened by the fruits of their labor and by planting that victory garden on the White House lawn. Thank you!
Well, we raise $500,000 a year for King School, that's one school and we're not serving every child lunch there.
We're giving every child an experience in the garden and in the kitchen classrooms and we are funding the salary of The Head of Nutrition Services,
we're funding all the teachers that brings life into this project, two gardener teachers and a kitchen teacher, two americore,
two administrators and it's not possible to do this kind of program without
local funding, city funding, state funding, and federal funding, unless you have Bill Gates or Warren Buffett
right here at your, you know...yard.
This is expensive because we want to pay the farmers the real price of food. I want to pay the farmers. I want them to be happy farming
for Chez Panisse. I want to pay them and with the money that we have for the schools, it's so low,
even though Anne Cooper who has been working with us for the last couple of years, has performed miracles in buying local and organic food
within the budget, it is not good enough from my point of view; these children deserve the very best possible and very best possible circumstances
for eating that food. They need to be brought into a pleasurable, beautiful circumstance and that's
what this is about and I think it should be the number one priority.
Well, Eliot Coleman's philosophy of having a greenhouse and I think we have to think that those greenhouses, we have to bring them back and there are lots of beautiful models
like the one in Maine. Eliot Coleman farms all winter and he closes in the summer and he grows salads and herbs and wonderful little carrots
and radishes and he does this in a beautiful, organic way. So, we have to take those models, we don't have to invent them again. Now, Chez Panisse really serves
only what's in season food and you would think we have the the hor of plenty, we do not, we only have tomatoes for four months,
we only have eggplant for that time. We are eating, I can tell you right now, we are eating persimmons and pomegranates.
We're just going into the fall, we have nuts and berries...cranberry, I mean the things that are produced
right now are vegetables and we have root cellars again. We have to can what's good to can and pickle what's good pickle. But there are grains
of all kinds that we could be growing, and beans of every color and, you know, cauliflowers that are lime green,
carrots that are orange and red and white, you know...we just haven't begun to explore what's possible
and I just thought something great that could happen at this beautiful museum, would be to bring together a Foraging conference to figure out
what is being grown in Indiana? What's here? What do you have? What can you use? [Corn!]
Corn? Did you say corn? But you'll be surprised, you know, on the East Coast, they say "we can't grow artichokes, we have never heard of __________,
those are south of France, California things," and right there in New Haven, Connecticut, they have about ten kinds of different,
you know radicchio and hardened, artichokes, all of that can be grown. It's just something grown better in certain microclimates
and we have to figure out which ones are better and the gardener there had a great little tomato that can go through the summer rains
and it's a matter of putting our minds to it and connecting with other people around the world who have similar climates
and experiences and share that knowledge.
It's so important, it's a beautiful way to teach kids about biodiversity and cultural diversity and some of the best lessons
are given by parents who come into the schools and, you know, they love to demonstrate how to make, you know, tortillas or chapattis
and if the whole lesson is connected to the history class when you are making a curry and adding the spices together
and the mother is wearing a sari and you are living that experience and you don't even feel like you are in history classroom
in school and you remember it through your whole life. I mean it's like you are doing improvisational cooking in the kitchen for a drama class.
You know, I was talking about it today with a group of chefs, it's like the difference between exercise and dancing.
We're teaching kids how to dance and we are bringing them into a pleasurable experience of school
and they become socialized and predisposed to learn when they are sitting together and they are eating the food that they have grown and cooked themselves,
I mean it's an amazing thing to see and you say, "This is right as rain."
Why isn't this happening in every school? Why isn't it? You know...?
I can't say it like Tony Morrison says, but I wish I could.
She says, "We all know the right thing to do, we just need to do it," and it's true, you go into this,
you think why this is happening, let's do this, let's change it and it's a matter, it's amazing how many comes to good ideas
and that's what will happen, I am sure.
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