![]() In 1971, Alice Waters, at the age of twenty-seven, and UC Berkeley comparative literature professor Paul Aratow open their pioneering restaurant, Chez Panisse, in an arts and crafts house along Shattuck Avenue, in Berkeley. ![]() She lived at the bottom of a market street where she was enchanted by the fresh seasonal produce for sale and the custom of buying fresh ingredients daily. In France, Waters found that her fascination with things French extended beyond history to the food culture and cuisine of contemporary France. As part of her program, she had the opportunity to study for a year in France, and at age 19, she packed her bags for Paris. Waters was studying French history and culture with particular emphasis on the tumultuous century encompassing the French Revolution and its aftermath. Waters graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1967 with a degree in French cultural studies before training at the International Montessori School in London. ![]() 1969: Alice Waters teaching at a Montessori school. The Berkeley campus and the surrounding San Francisco Bay Area became a center of resistance to what many saw as the oppressive conformity of the previous decade. Berkeley students eventually won the right of free political expression on campus, allowing more students to question the political consensus of the Cold War era. Waters was inspired by the movement, particularly by the impassioned oratory of one of the movement’s leaders, graduate student Mario Savio. Students who had participated in the Civil Rights Movement’s “Freedom Summer,” registering African American voters in the Deep South, fought efforts by the campus police to enforce the ban met with civil disobedience by Berkeley students, and mass arrests. The Berkeley Free Speech Movement arose in response to the university’s ban on campus political activity by groups other than the two national political parties. ![]() She enrolled in the University of California at Santa Barbara, then transferred to the University of California at Berkeley, arriving in 1964, just as the campus was rocked by the first of the era’s student-led protest movements. Her mother was interested in making healthy food choices for her family and limiting her children’s sugar intake, but by her own account, the young Alice was a picky eater, who took no great interest in where her food came from or how it was produced. Her father, Charles, worked as a management consultant while her mother, Margaret, worked at home. (© Alice Waters)Īlice Waters was born in Chatham, New Jersey, the second of four sisters. Ap1950s: Alice Waters dressed in a cowboy outfit with her three sisters at Christmas in New Jersey. ![]()
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