Miss Edith and Her Ongoing Gripe: Alice Waters

Miss Edith enjoys eating good food as much as the next person. In fact, she may enjoy it even more than the next person, given that the next person (these days) seems to regard McDonald’s as a food group unto itself.

So it’s not going to ring exactly true when she starts off by saying here that she thinks Alice Waters is the biggest pain in the ass.

Alice Waters has done an awful lot of good for an awful lot of people. We all eat better and more interesting food as the result of her influence. (Please see David Kamp’s United States of Arugula, any issue of Gourmet magazine printed in the last thirty years, or today’s article in the New York Times.) I am personally thrilled that Americans eat more beets because of Alice Waters. I love goat cheese and it’s because of Alice Waters. I get it, folks, I really do.

But at the same time, I really wish – Notarius is so sick of hearing me talk about this – I really wish that someone would kick this woman in the butt and get her to be just a smidge, a pinch, more realistic about food and cooking.

It was gratifying, in today’s Times article, to read the writer make a few digs in this direction. I don’t read nearly enough in major press outlets about how annoying Alice Waters is. I certainly harp on it a lot, but, you know, no one listens to me. Who the hell am I to talk about food? After all, I live in Connecticut, don’t own a restaurant, am not an organic farmer, and have no clout whatsoever.

But you know, it’s almost precisely because of those fact that people – people like Alice Waters, even – should pay attention to what I, and people like me, think. Home cooking is mostly done by people like me. Or at least, people not that unlike me. Home cooking is done more by people like me than by people like Alice Waters. People like Alice Waters, I’d wager, spend more time eating out than eating in. And people like Alice Waters always live in some place – like, say, Berkeley, CA – where it’s possible to get darling little baby beets, baby this, or baby that, all twelve months out of the year.

Fuck this shit. Reading about Alice Waters is enough to make this goat-cheese loving snob want to go buy a can of Ravioli-Os and eat them straight from the can. Cold.

Them’s tasty.