Cool Clear Waters

Last time we saw Alice Waters, the famous food enthusiast was cooking Werner Herzog's shoe in Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, a great movie about shoes and movies and Werner Herzog. But today, she talks about the Slow Food Movement, essentially a bid to get good food out of the kitchen and into the streets; in other words, out of the gourmet ghetto and into the public school system. When The New York Times calls her a "food revolutionary," as it did last year (in a surprisingly ignorant article, btw) it's because Waters thinks food is political. What a crazy, wild-eyed notion! Hey, look over there! No, not at the school lunches, at the Diet Pepsi! Mmm, Pepsi.

At How We Eat and the Quest for a Slow Food Nation, Waters headlines a panel of people who also think that health, public policy, education, and food are — get this, NYT — interconnected. We know, "interconnected" is a "Berkeley word," but you'd better get used to it, or the worst thing in the world will happen to you: Your children might get fat. Yeah, yeah, that's it: Fat kids are the problem. Not your receding local water table, or general ill health, or the death of biodiversity. (Who needs bees, anyway?) Whatever your motivation, listen to her. Alice Waters is joined by smart people including Eric Schlosser of Fast Food Nation fame.
Thu., July 31, 6 p.m., 2008