CYNTHIA D. BERTELSEN

Alice Waters deserves more main-stream press recognition. Follow the link to see the detail about Alice’s Restaurant (!) taking shape in Washington DC, where $500 gets you the best meal in town. (Note that $350 of that lump sum will end up in the coffers of local soup kitchens, and rightly so.)

Aided by a group of local culin-istas, Waters hopes the Monday night menu will features Chesapeake Bay oysters and crostini; rockfish soup and a confit of saffron-spiked tomatoes, though if the fish don’t look so great, she’ll shift to winter vegetables; shoulder of local lamb with salsa verde, and an apple tart.

There will no fussy wine pairings, “just a red and a white” from California donated by friends. Yes, she knows the Veuve Cliquot Champagne, made in France and provided by the vineyard for the toast to President-elect Obama, is hardly carbon neutral.

“You try to eat as locally as possible but then you make exceptions” for such long-distance staples as olive oil and good bubbly.

My point exactly. Read the Article at HuffingtonPost .

Don’t forget National Service Day, January 19, 2009:  Food pantries across the nation need more inventory, so grab some cans at the grocery store and drop them off at your neighborhood food pantry or kick in some money for the soup kitchen. Volunteer some time or cook a meal for someone.

As Alice so succinctly says, “In Washington, we are trying to come back to the table, where we gather friends and family, where we want to eat together because the food is nourishing and tasty.”

And thus we must seek community. To bring about changes in the rhythm of our days, food is a mighty weapon.  As some astute observer noted about France and French artists:

“Does a well-fed race produce more geniuses than others?” ~Anonymous~