From the menu outside Chez Panisse in North Berkeley. Many who need the revolution aren't going to wait a whole month to start.
If there is a food revolution, the revolution must be readily accessible to all the masses. This is a theme that has been inside my head for some time.
The Jose Andres segment touched upon it in Sunday night's 60 Minutes. Being outside Chez Panisse in North Berkeley touched upon this theme. In both places, you need a reservation at least a month in advance.
Considering that I planned my Bay Area trip at the last minute, there was no room for me at Chez Panisse. This isn't to say that people shouldn't have pretentious restaurants: even in poor financial times that we live in, those who want it will sacrifice to make it work. And the money.
We should remember to convey the basic message that this is not what eating well-grown food is all about. Too often, eating well-grown food is more about the elite and less about the masses.
It's funny when you walk down Shattuck Road in Berkeley on a sunny Friday morning looking for Chez Panisse and realizing that you walked right past it without noticing. The building is nice and the porch looked very cool, but the outside wasn't very inviting.
By contrast, other nearby businesses that specialize in well-grown food were more open and friendly. The Cheeseboard Collective was filled with people either getting breakfast or gathering food for later meals. Love at First Bite was hard to find, but I could walk right in and get what I needed. This was worth the trip once you bit into a strawberry cupcake made from real strawberries.
No place is more inviting to see, smell, and sample fresh, local food than the farmers market at the Ferry Building back in San Francisco. Inside, outside — local farmers and other food makers warmly welcoming the passers-by as they peek into the numerous stalls. if you haven't had breakfast, your mouth may produce enough saliva to fill the bay behind the market.
As Jamie Oliver's classroom experiment showed us, kids don't always recognize vegetables, even the more obvious ones. If a child doesn't recognize a vegetable or a fruit at a farmers market, there is someone skilled to tell them all about it.
Food is very simple and yet the number of choices can be daunting. Look at the aisles of a grocery store and try to see them through the eye of someone who is poor in food literacy.
Restaurants that require a month's advance notice is going to be a part of the revolution if there is one. But to pull off a good revolution, these places must play a very small part. As Andres noted in the 60 Minutes interview, there is about 3% of Americans who eat in those types of restaurants. Those 3% are on board with the revolution.
The other 97% are a concern. When PBS ran Food Inc. as part of its POV series, I kept going back to that Hispanic family in the grocery store debating about buying a head of broccoli, who had to get up early and so they were eating fast food in the car on the way to work.
Food revolution: these are the people you have to sway, as well as countless others who like the idea of eating better but feel lost, confused, and stressed over how to do better by food. Preaching to the converted — that has been done over and over. Those who have not heard the word — they cry in the night, not knowing or understanding what is wrong — they need to hear. And they can't wait a month to get into a fancy restaurant to find out.
All photo credits by me with full copyrights.
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.