Alice Waters: Bringing Fresh Food to California Before Alice Waters came along, California cuisine was a barren landscape of fast food joints and inauthentic diners. No one catered to the local produce market or used local growers to provide that distinctive, fresh and "local" flavor and color that both connoisseurs and ordinary diners could enjoy. Waters was determined to change all of that. By focusing on seasonal foods and authentic pairings, Waters created a naturalistic cuisine that brought real food styles from France (the Old World) back to America (the New World) where they had been lost in the fast food market of recent years. Starting out with little more than instinct and what she had learned from her French exposure, Waters' restaurant grew into a world-renowned phenomenon and kicked off a veritable "revolution" in the food industry.

Alice Waters is a great inspiration for me because she has become not just a great chef but also a great activist in terms of promoting healthy food awareness. A significant proponent of the organic foods movement, Waters is perhaps best known for her Chez Panisse, which uses locally-produce organic foods. She started the habit of using local organic foods while living abroad in France. In college she had already begun French Cultural Studies, so when she actually went to the country, she was prepared to immerse herself in the food environment. She later acknowledged that she learned primarily by surrounding herself with this culture -- that is,...

She opened her restaurant and made it a point of pride to use only the freshest, locally produced organic foods on her customer's plate. Thus, she not only supported local growers in her own community but also supported a healthy diet that did not consist of mass-produced food items or genetically altered products. In other words, she was an American pioneer for healthy organic foods in an age when authenticity was going the way of the do-do.
Her respect for product was based primarily on taste and flavor -- what was freshest and most effective in pleasing people was what was locally and organically grown. She knew that by experience, from her time in France, and using these ingredients to make "slow food" popular in a "fast food" world, Waters began a career took her to the top of the game.

Therefore what Waters has accomplished in her career, from her restaurant, to her sense of hospitality and desire to please people, which began at an early age and continued on into her travels in Turkey where hospitality was an important part of their culture, continues to motivate me and fill me a sense of appreciation and wonder (McNamee,…