What is also certain is that Alice appreciated the food of France—and what it might mean to us—in a way that few others did at the time. And she applied that passion in ways that no one in America had previously considered. In those days, when the Dream was new and Chez Panisse was just starting up, it was democratic, inclusive, dysfunctional, and ludicrously, admirably, unprofitable. Had someone with any business sense at all attempted to do what Alice was trying to do, it never would have happened. Surely, this was a very fine and good thing.

Alice thinks what we eat is important. So do I. She thinks it’s the most important thing in the world. I do not. But I’m quite sure that we both have made major decisions in our lives, gained and lost friends, based on what’s to eat.

Alice thinks farmers should make more money—growing stuff that’s both good-tasting and good for us. Who could be against that? I like farms. So I don’t want to work on one. I doubt very much that Alice does either. So we have that in common, too.

She thinks, as I do, that we should be aware of what’s good in our own backyards and support those things—by eating them, and growing more of them. I’m with her, to a point. But then I don’t have a backyard.

Strikingly, she is, and always has been, a carnivore. There is no question as to her position on foie gras. For decades, in the middle of Berkeley, she has unapologetically championed the use of animal flesh as food rather than as something that should someday win the right to vote. In this respect, being blissfully out of touch with what’s going on around her has served her well.

In fact, it’s Alice’s very hypocrisy that belies her true virtues. Because what’s truly wonderful about Alice is that she is, first and foremost, a sensualist. When you see Alice preaching about how you should be eating local—while nibbling on sea urchin roe from Hokkaido or foie gras from Gascony—at least you know she really appreciates the good stuff. It may be strategically foolish and inappropriate and bad for her argument to be seen cooking a fresh-laid organic egg over an open fire for Leslie Stahl—but I’ll bet it tasted fucking delicious.

What makes Alice Waters such a compelling character is her infectious enthusiasm for pleasure. She’s made lust, greed, hunger, self-gratification, and fetishism look good. When Alice shows you a bunch of radishes, you fucking want them. Where have those radishes been all my life? I need them!

Who cares if she knows the Heimlich maneuver? Did Gandhi know the Heimlich maneuver? Does Bono?

And skimming over the pages of a recent biography, I see there is the oft-cited charge that Alice has made a career of taking credit for the work of others.

To which I’d reluctantly have to ask: Exactly which chefs—to one extent or another—haven’t done that? How could the batty hippie chick have really been responsible for such an important era in gastronomy, is the implied question. Yet, so many male chefs have climbed or leaped to the top over the smashed bodies of subordinates and peers—without accruing fault or foul. The question lingers—and, along with it, I gather, some animus—because Alice survived and prospered where many of her original hippie contemporaries did not. She had the temerity to make money eventually. To figure out, or at least accept, that the Dream could not grow, much less survive, in a commune.

If you’re still looking to find “the True Genius behind the Whole Thing”—examining old menus at Chez Panisse, pre-Tower and post-Tower, for instance—you may as well be scrutinizing blurry photographs of the grassy knoll. There is, as with the Kennedy assassination, a case to be made for a second shooter. But spend too long looking and, in the end, you miss the point entirely.

Alice Waters is still here. Jeremiah Tower is not.

Alice is widely known—and will probably always be known—as the “Mother of Slow Food.” Jeremiah Tower allowed himself to become a footnote to history.

And history, as they say, will always be written by the victors.

13 Heroes and Villains

Fergus Henderson is a hero.

In the best heroic tradition, he’d be mortified to hear this. He’s English, for one—and painfully modest about all the adulation. His restaurant, St. John, was intended as an equally modest venture: a plain white room in a former smokehouse, where a few like-minded Englishmen could eat traditional English food and drink French claret. I am quite sure that his aspirations for the book Nose to Tail Eating (aka The Whole Beast in the United States), a collection of recipes and related musings, were even more limited.

Yet Nose to Tail is now considered one of the classic cookbooks of All Time, a collector’s item, a must-have for any chef anywhere in the world wanting cred from his peers, the Bible for the ever-growing “guts mafia,” the opening shot in an ongoing (if slow-motion) battle that’s still, even today, changing the whole world of food. St. John the restaurant, an undecorated white room serving barely garnished English country fare, continues to be lavishly (and, at times, ludicrously) over-praised: frequently named “one of the best restaurants in the world”—ahead of temples of haute gastronomy that are (technically) far more deserving of those kinds of official honors. I believe Fergus has even been honored by the Queen—for his service to the Crown—which is also crazy, if you think about it, for a one-time architect who dropped out and started cooking bistro grub, soon after to specialize in the kind of country-ass stuff his grandmother used to cook.

But he is a hero. That he’s my hero is well documented. Since my first meal at St. John, when I flopped onto my knees in the kitchen, babbling something spectacularly idiotic but heartfelt, like “You RAWK!!!” (Fergus wasn’t even there that evening), I’ve shamelessly basked in his reflected glory at every opportunity. I am a supporter, an acolyte, a devotee, an advocate for all things Henderson. I am a True Believer.

I believe that Fergus Henderson, in a way that very few chefs have ever been, is good for society as a whole. Because, unlike any chef I’ve ever heard of, he has influenced people who’ve never been to St. John, never eaten his food, certainly never read his book, and don’t have any idea who the fuck this Fergus Henderson guy might be. He has, however unwittingly, given permission to generations of chefs and cooks to follow their hearts in ways that were unthinkable only a few years ago. Simply by doing what he’s doing, he’s inspired others to put things on their menus and look at ingredients they might never have thought of had he not done it first—and, as the word spreads, minds and menus change, and no one even knows where it all might have started.

Mario Batali, Chris Cosentino, Martin Picard, April Bloomfield, Gabrielle Hamilton are obvious examples of chefs who felt liberated by Fergus’s early example. I say “obvious,” because they’d be the first to tell you. But it’s all the others…the lone chefs and cooks out there, in the Heartland of America, England, and Australia, who yearned for a Fergus to come along and inspire them, give them courage, long before he actually appeared.

I will never forget the smell of the rooms, years ago, tiny venues in rural England, in working-class cities where Fergus was on book tour. All the kids came out, still stinking of the deep fryer, the chip shop, whatever crappy pub, depressing and wrongheaded “lounge/restaurant” they might have been working at at the time. Many of them had never even been to London. But they knew who Fergus was alright—and what he was all about. And the look on their faces—of ambition and hope—was inspiring.