What's for Breakfast, Alice?

What would Alice do? About breakfast. I’m talking about Alice Waters,  queen of the sustainable-crops, only-in-season, locally-produced, cooked-with-care, fresh-food-slow-food movement.

Waters spoke at The Hotchkiss School in Lakeville last Tuesday, conjuring, like a magician, images of ice cream made with mulberries, infinitesimal and varied lettuces, bowls of warm goat’s milk, food, she insists, that ought to be within easy reach.

Of everyone.

“We need real food,� she told a massive audience of adolescents instructed to dress up for the occasion. “We need to know where our food comes from, and how it is grown.�

So here I am the morning after, looking around my kitchen for something fresh, something wholesome, above all something virtuous to eat. For breakfast.

“Good food is a right. Not a luxury,� she told us, her tiny being in mousy taupe (no cute, sunny, vaguely bohemian, going-to-the-farmers’ market outfit here), and mostly hidden by the rostrum.

“Ripe, fresh, pure wholesome food that’s good for us,� she piped. “That’s what we have to demand. For every table. Not just at fancy restaurants.�

Chez Panisse, the neighborhood bistro she opened with friends in Berkeley, CA, in 1971, is one of those fancy restaurants now, with diners waiting at least a month for a table and a dish like “Wolfe Ranch quail grilled over fig branches� or “Bob’s rocket with pecorino and toasted hazelnuts.�

At the outset, Waters’ idea was simply to serve flavorful food, prepared with devotion and flair to folk of modest means. But to be flavorful, she discovered, ingredients had to be fresh, cultivated without chemicals and raised without hormones, antibiotics and industrial feed. Afire with the rightness of her cause, armed, as well, with winning and persistent ways, she changed the way a lot of people produce, cook and choose food.

“I reached out to farmers, dairymen, ranchers. I had to go to markets in Chinatown. I had to convince growers to cultivate certain fruits and vegetables.�

The restaurant actually had an employee with the title of forager (according to David Kamp in his entertaining book “The United States of Arugula�), often Waters herself, whose job it was to scout for fresh, unusual and wild edibles, sometimes plucked along railroad tracks.

In time, what started as a small rustic neighborhood bistro in Berkeley, turned into a giant movement attracting the attention of all kinds of people: chefs, food writers, farmers, foodies and one Alexander Schell, 17, a  Hotchkiss student who introduced Waters to the crowd.

Early in his adolescence, Waters had marched Alexander’s family around Venice, Italy, seeking a restaurant for lunch. She nixed one place after another, and, finally, in desperation, Alexander and his brother dropped out of the search and settled for a pizza spot with neon signs and greasy pies ossifying under orange heat lamps, “The anti-Alice restaurant.� As the boys wolfed their corporate, land- and soul-destroying lunch near the plate-glass window, Waters spied them.

“She was incredulous at the sight. Alice is so uncompromising, we were ashamed to betray her cause,� Alexander told us, with Waters standing a few feet to his right. “She inspires cult-like devotion.�

She inspires criticism, too, because eating fresh and local and organic is expensive. Maybe worse, it seems finicky, unAmerican, elitist.

But Waters is ready: “Fast, cheap and easy still describes the way most Americans eat,� she told her audience. “But cheap is an illusion. Food that degrades the environment and our health and our values and our culture has a high cost.�

All right. I’m hooked. But what am I going to eat this morning? I find “The Alice Waters breakfast� on Chowhound, a Web site “for those who love to eat.� Accordingly, I fry a locally produced egg in olive oil and lap it over chopped tomatoes on a piece of toast. Not kosher, because the tomatoes came from Israel and the bread from the very corporate Pepperidge Farm, and the olive oil, though virginal and first-cold-pressed, is Spanish and not, evidently, organically produced. Nonetheless, it was delicious. Soul satisfying. And a start.

This the first in a series about our food. Next, we take a look at how schools could change the way young people eat.