San Francisco Zen Center

2008 Annual Benefit Event and Auction
Honoring Alice Waters

Sunday, March 30, 2008 | Greens Restaurant

The Most Important Thing Award

For 50 years, San Francisco Zen Center has been a cultural vanguard: musicians, philosophers, painters, writers, poets, scholars, scientists, environmentalists, farmers, cooks and more have come to Zen Center to deepen their understanding of life and its mysteries. Deep in the stillness of Zen practice, we wrestle with Suzuki Roshi’s loving but insistent question, “What’s the most important thing?”  What we discover is our interconnectedness and interdependence with all beings, great or small, visible or invisible. At our Annual Benefit Event, we honor those individuals who express these values in their everyday life, in everyday situations, and who show an exemplary and unwavering commitment to be of benefit to others.

This year, we are especially pleased to honor Alice Waters, author of the recently published The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution, and perhaps the individual more responsible than anyone for the revolution in the way we eat, cook, and think about food.  

With the opening of Chez Panisse in the 1970s, Alice set a new standard for eating and dining, serving only the highest quality ingredients, fostering relationships with local growers and ranchers, and paying fastidious attention to every detail. Alice and Chez Panisse have influenced generations of chefs and home cooks, awakening our senses to what is truly nourishing–not just for us, but for the planet and all the beings this earth sustains.  In the years since, Alice has tirelessly championed the value of simple food, encouraging all of us to know–and care about–where it comes from and how it’s raised.  

The Chez Panisse Foundation seeks to educate children about their food choices and the impact those choices have on their health, their communities and their environment.  The Foundation also advocates at the national and state levels for stronger connections between, and greater funding for, national policy on hunger, the environment, agriculture, health, and education.  In the past 10 years, the Foundation has established two groundbreaking models:  The Edible Schoolyard, a working garden, kitchen and dining classroom at the Martin Luther King Middle School, and the School Lunch Initiative, a comprehensive strategy to change meal programs throughout the Berkeley Unified School District. 

Zen Center’s warm and enduring relationship with Alice goes back many years.  Alice’s bold vision of cooking and new way of thinking about food inspired Greens co-founder Deborah Madison’s vision for Greens.  In turn, Alice’s search for organic produce for Chez Panisse led her to Green Gulch Farm, where she established a deep and abiding relationship with then-head gardener, Wendy Johnson. Wendy now serves as garden consultant and mentor for the Edible Schoolyard and has recently published her first book, Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate.

2008 Honoree
Alice Waters