Alice Waters: Frisée Salad + Pear Galette

Your Last Meal with Rachel Belle

Rachel Belle

Music Interviews, Arts, Food, Comedy Interviews, Tv & Film, Film Interviews, Comedy, Music, Science, History

4.4 • 709 Ratings

🗓️ 11 December 2025

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Alice Waters opened her iconic Berkeley, California restaurant Chez Panisse 54 years ago, introducing the concept of farm-to-table eating to Americans and only serving local, seasonal produce at peak ripeness. She’s also a food activist, and through The Edible Schoolyard Project, has spent the past 30 years showing schools how to integrate locally farmed, organic produce into their cafeterias.

On today’s episode, Alice shares two life-changing experiences that inspired her to open her restaurant; what diners thought about being served two figs for dessert in Chez Panisse’s early days; how schools can afford to serve kids farm fresh food; and what she packed in her own daughter’s lunchbox. And we take a peak inside her her new cookbook, A School Lunch Revolution.

Then the Director of Nutrition Services for California’s Sweet Water Union High School district joins the show to talk about how he flipped the district’s lunch program on its head, buying more than half of the food from local farmers and producers or having the students grow it themselves.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Rachel Bell, and this is your last meal.
0:12.4	The show where celebrities share stories about the foods they love most, and we dig into the history, culture, or science of those meals with experts from around the world. Today on the program,
0:23.2	Alice Waters, the award-winning chef and food activist responsible for pioneering the farm-to-table
0:30.0	movement and California cuisine. Alice has been running her iconic Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse,
0:36.8	for 54 years.
0:39.2	She was the first chef to list the names of local farms on her menus, and she founded the
0:45.2	nonprofit Edible Schoolyard Project 30 years ago, which brings us to her new cookbook,
0:51.5	a school lunch revolution that she hopes will inspire schools to serve fresh,
0:56.6	organic, healthy food on a public school budget. Later in the show, I will speak with a nutrition
1:02.1	director of a San Diego school district doing exactly that. But first, my conversation with Alice Waters.
1:16.8	Okay, let me hear you talk a little bit.
1:17.9	It's so nice to meet you.
1:19.3	What do you have for breakfast this morning?
1:22.5	But I always have for breakfast.
1:35.9	A scrambled egg cooked in olive oil and a little bit of salad, vinegar, have a little tortilla on the side, and I drink puir tea.
1:43.2	That makes life easier. It's kind of like, you know, wearing the same thing to work every day. It's like that with food.
1:45.2	I do exactly that.
1:52.7	There's the really stable things in my life, my wardrobe and my breakfast.
1:53.6	Yeah.
1:56.0	Did you wear the same thing every day? I wear black trousers.
1:59.9	And I wear a Christina Kemp shirt, if I want to be fancy.
2:07.2	And I wear in the winter this blue sweater.
	...

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