Letters to the Editor
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Alice, we don't live in your ideal world.
Your ideas are wonderful, Ms. Waters, but aside from buying humanely raised eggs, which ought to be the legal standard everywhere, your advocacy of cooking from scratch is simply incompatible with the experience of most working people.
I cook for my wife 4-5 times a week, and I do it from scratch to the extent possible; however, we rely on bagged salads. We rely on bottled sauces. We rely on dried, pre-packaged spices. Even without having children, and even with these conveniences, we normally do not sit down to dinner before 8 pm.
How do you expect working families, especially with children, to adhere to your suggestions? It simply is not possible in this ridiculously flawed society we live in. That is the privlege of the wealthy or retired, or the dwindling one worker, one stay-at-home spouse family.
Dream on, Ms. Waters. One day the world will catch up to you. Until then, we will live in the 40/50/60 hour workweek, two weeks vacation, both partners working, stupendously inhumane American lifestyle (except for our wealthy rulers, who benefit from our misery).
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Love To Cook, Hate To Shop
I love to cook, and I'm glad to use fresh, local ingredients when I can. But I think people who live in California (where evidently there are 24 hour farmer's markets on every corner) are a bit clueless at the state of farmer's markets in other parts of the country, especially when you get out of a couple of big cities, not to mention the realities of working a job that requires you to be at work at certain times.
I recently moved, and tried to find a local farmer's market. I found two fairly nearby - one that ran 10-2 on Tuesdays and another that ran 11-3 on Fridays. Hmmm, which one of those is compatible with an 8 to 6 job? I finally found a Saturday farmer's market that entailed a 40 mile round trip. I got there by 8 am and the place was practically empty - evidently if you aren't there by six, you can't get anything decent. I'm not willing to get up at 5 am on a Saturday so I can drive 40 miles to buy a few vegetables. (Maybe you morning people think that's fun, but not me.)
And this isn't unusual - I've lived in four different places, and it's always been hard to find a farmer's market that's open at workable times. I'm not a huge fan of Whole Foods, but at least I can shop there after work. I don't want to spend all my time trying to work my schedule around the extremely limited hours of the local farmer's market. I'd rather spend that time cooking and eating.
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Too idealistic
I'm lucky enough to live in a town in the Central Valley of California that has two large farmers markets each week, where I can buy all sorts of locally grown organic produce including nuts and honey, as well as eggs and flowers. But not everyone has this convenience. I read a magazine article recently about a city dweller in NYC who attempted to make a dinner out of locally produced organic food, and while the author was able to do it, the amount of time and gas used for the trip to buy one item in one part of the city, then another in a different place, another in a third, and so on, made it very clear why most people in large urban areas not near agricultural lands shop in supermarkets. I'm also very skeptical that anyone running a restaurant in the Bay Area has access to locally grown organic grain for their flour, though it's possible she may have a small source - but there certainly isn't enough of a supply for the rest of us. And no one's going to make me feel guilty for buying that in a store.
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She's a leprechaun?
Burn in hell, you little green bastard!
Seriously, Alice Waters is an amazing individual. You go! Best of luck in all your endeavors.
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We are the Farmers
Alice , congratulation, what's cooking. I was born in Rio Frio, and there we are the farmers, you know , we puts beans together, below the ground, and we hoped to have more natural beans. There, the days are beutifull and the soil are very humus rich. And also we have a lots of beautifull butterfly in different colors and shapes. Today we are going to cook butterflys, because there is not beans to cooks. Tomorrow we need to kill all insect if we want to have a stew of bean. You want to know what's that mean? Alls of the farmers are using the same ways.
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Buying locally
I like the idea of buying locally and seasonally. But I wonder, since all solutions breed new and unexpected problems, how does this affect the economy of nations that export food? Countries like Chile or New Zealand, that export all that yummy fruit in Winter. Many of their economies are dependent on their exporting these goods. If, and this is a big if, we all decide to buy locally, how will our actions affect them? And how will their tanking economies affect ours? Do any salon readers have any ideas?
Thanks.
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priorities
The thing about Waters' assumptions that drives me most crazy is that she assumes food should be a higher priority than anything else. Slow down, she says, enjoy life... as if everyone enjoys cooking, first of all, which I do sometimes but only in spurts, and as if spending forever cooking is the only pleasant thing to do in all of life. Maybe I want to spend Saturday lying in bed with my husband having sex, instead of getting up at 5 am to get to the farmer's market downtown before all the food is gone and spending 2 hours driving there and back and another hour standing in the hot sun waiting in line. Maybe I could have used that time to write a story, take a photograph, or plant roses. Maybe my work, which she thinks I should want to escape, is actually my pleasure, and actually of value to the world, too.
Speaking of farmer's markets, I wasn't kidding about getting up at five am. There's a fellow who writes a blog about the local food scene, and according to him, if you want organic eggs you better get there before six. The most recent time he went, he found that a single person had arrived before him and bought every last one of the eggs.