Alice Waters and Eric Schlosser

Last night I saw Alice Waters on a panel of speakers moderated by Eric Schlosser. It was a packed event in an old and overly ornate room at the Fairmont to kick off the How We Eat speakers series, presented by the Commonwealth Club. All of which is a precursor to the Labor Day event in San Francisco, Slow Food Nation.

In addition to Alice the panel members were the Executive Director of Slow Food Nation, Anya Fernald, Executive Director for the Center of Public Health Advocacy, Harold Goldstein, and the President and Director of Medical Research at Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute, Bertram Lubin. All strong, knowledgeable speakers.

The primary focus of the evening was how do we feed our children and make real food versus manufactured food available to communities on the edge. Each panelist held a piece of the puzzle towards creating a healthy food system.

Ms. Fernald's answer was making food a higher priority in our lives by spending more time and allocating more resources towards it.

Mr. Goldstein's response was to get politically involved, to incite policy to insure real food and corporate responsibility.

Mr. Lubin's answer was to begin addressing the issue of a healthy diet at the prenatal stage with education as well as allocating our health care dollars to prevention to decrease illness liability.

Eric Schlosser got in some good lines. He's entertainingly quick on his feet and wickedly smart.

But the best line of the evening, of course, came from Alice. It was in response to a question along the lines of, how can we best eat well. She replied loosely, "take some olive oil and a little salt and go into the garden." In that moment, she won me over. I can eat anything with a little olive oil and a good sea salt.

The discussion left a flavor of hope that we are waking up to the health risks of manufactured foods to ourselves, our children and the planet. And that we all have the ability three times a day to make changes towards a healthier system. But there's work to do to accomplish that.

Grab some olive and head to the garden (or the refrigerator produce drawer). And eat well.

The evening was recorded and will be available via audio stream or radio broadcast. I'll include a link when it is.

Edit: Here's a link with video and transcript of the talk!

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

What a great discussion to be part of. Eric Schlosser and Alice Walters. Looking forward to the broadcast being up.

Kale for Sale said...

kathryn - It looks like the audios are about three weeks out but I'll keep checking. They were a good combo because Eric is quite grounded and, well, Alice is more ethereal so they played off each other nicely.

Green Bean said...

How wonderful. Isn't it true that a little olive oil and some salt and a seasonal vegetable and everything is all good! Are you going to anything at Slow Food Nation? I'm going to some of the events. Looking forward to it and to seeing the Victory Garden in front of City Hall.

Donna said...

Sounds like it was a great discussion! I can't download the broadcast on our current dial-up desktop, but... if I win the ebay laptop in 4 minutes then I will own my first laptop and it will have wi-fi!!!

Kale for Sale said...

green bean - Or better yet, Super Green Woman! I love the picture.

I've even become specific about my olive and salt. Bariani's or McEvoy with a sea salt from New Zealand. It's simple, but oh, does it make me happy.

Yep, I'll be at SFN getting ideas at how little people like me can promote local foods into the big mainstream food chain as a way to reduce or individual carbon bite. And then I too will go and leap tall buildings. Ha! Really I think it's mostly going to be a lot of good tasty fun with a thing or two to learn in between.

donna - Did you win?! Did you win?! Laptops are dangerous though. I carry mine around the house.

Going Crunchy said...

Oh, awesome comment. My husband, the Greek, would totally agree. Well, he would say that you need to add a little Feta on the side and then you'd be just fine. Shan

Going Crunchy said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Donna said...

kale: No, I didn't win, but I'm learning a lot. I've bid on 4 different laptops, now, and gotten beaten out in the last 15 seconds every time. Our connection is so slow that I'm not sure how I'm ever going to win at this rate! But I have a couple more strategies to try...

Melissa said...

I love the olive oil/salt comment too! I ate the best beans this weekend (they were called frankenstein or something) out of my friend's garden and I was thinking what a shame it'd be to do anything at all to them!