"It was a sensual awakening for me, I felt like I never ate anything before that," says Waters, a self-confessed picky eater. But it was more than the food, it was the whole way of life that captivated the young woman. "People would race to the bakery in the morning to get their warm baguette, then go to the market to bring food home for the day. They'd meet their friends in restaurants to talk and have coffee in the afternoon. It was a beautiful way of life," she remembers. "It smelled good and tasted good."

On returning home, Waters, who had also acquired a degree in Montessori education in England, taught school and missed the French way of life. She tried to recapture it by cooking for her friends, one of whom had started a newspaper. They all sat around her table in Berkeley talking about the paper and--eating. Never having cooked before, Waters had to research recipes and that got her personally engaged in food. Realizing then that she liked cooking more than teaching, she decided to open a restaurant. Her parents mortgaged their home and gave her $10,000 with which Waters opened Chez Panisse in 1971. Reflecting on that decision now, she says, "I didn't know what I didn't know-if I had, I wouldn't have done it. I just thought, I'm cooking every night for all these friends who aren't paying me. This way, they'd come to eat and pay. Of course, as soon as I opened the restaurant, I never saw them again--there was no time for anything."

That early experience in Berkeley also brought home the realization that food was integrally connected with a sense of community. "That is what I love, but I didn't really get that until years later when I realized that, in fact, we had this little family of friends." It reminded her of her parents' home where her mother required them to be at the dinner table every night because "everybody in America came home for dinner in those days." In Waters's family, "We never ate in restaurants-we did not have the money."

Another early influence that shaped Waters was her father's "victory garden." During the war, as part of the war effort, the government asked Americans to grow their own food. "It was a wonderful idea. My father wasn't able to go into the army so he was eager to participate. They had a piece of land so they grew their own vegetables in New Jersey, the 'garden' state." Waters laughs at the irony of a state that is now industrialized and polluted and is saddened that, though it still grows beautiful produce, New Jersey can't find a way to send it across the bridge to New York.

Of those early days in Chez Panisse, Waters remembers, "I wanted it in a house so people would feel like they were coming to my home for dinner. We had one menu; it changed daily because I wanted to serve fresh food everyday." The restaurant was full every night but made no money for eight years. Waters had no experience and refused to compromise. "A guardian angel" met the payroll and ended up owning the restaurant. Waters bought it back from her. "In 1971, the four-course dinner was $3.95 and I was paying $5 an hour to every worker. It was unheard of at the time." But she made some good decisions, too. She leased the building with an option to buy and, in three years, bought it for $32,000.

To this day, the restaurant functions in a radical way. "We don't have a pyramid with one chef at the top: for each position we have two people, so we have two main chefs, two in pastry and each one works 3 days which is full time. There's a wonderful collaboration going on all the time." She herself is not a chef, Waters insists, because she does not have the training. "I couldn't make a puff pastry if my life depended on it. I can't make bread. But I'm a good critic and a good taster. I provide something very important because I'm a cook's critic. I've been in he kitchen and in the dining room, I travel a lot, I think about it a lot. I bring perspective. I can describe how things should look or taste and that's most useful for cooks."

America is all about choices but Waters has stuck to her idea of no a la carte menu. At Chez Panisse, as in a home, you eat what is served. And it's only dinner. Of her success, Waters says, "I had this obsession, I've been focused from the time I opened the restaurant. I wanted it to taste and feel like what I'd experienced in France and I was not going off that path. I never wanted to make money, I just wanted to live in that world. Money was secondary." But in 1980, a café was opened upstairs because the restaurant was becoming "too homogeneous in terms of people-my friends couldn't afford to eat there, and the price kept going up-now it's $40 on weekdays, $68 on weekends." Created to bring in different kinds of people-children, students, younger people-the café offers a variety of prices and more Italian-accented food.

What makes Chez Panisse unique, says Waters, is that the food is alive. "We pick it out of the ground and bring it to the table. It makes the difference between being good and being great. We do not disguise it with sauces and butter, but rather accentuate what it is ... not hiding it, but putting it up front. It's very South of France, very olive oil. It's always delicious, sometimes it's fantastic. We come to the cooking with a blank page, rethinking everything. It's like an improvisation. And it's always served with love." Indeed, love is what food is all about. Love and nurturing. And that is what drives Waters to her passionate hatred of fast food. "People don't undestand the consequences of eating anonymous food when they buy that hamburger. Fast food is destroying culture, agriculture, a way of life. Fast food makers have no interest in nutrition. They're marketing it simply so they can make money-it's immoral. We have to take what we spend on fast food and give it to those who take care of the land, who care about us."

Such thinking eventually led Waters to the idea of politically influencing children, the saddest victims of fast food. "We can reach every kid through the public school system with a curriculuum that teaches kids to be stewards of the land, teach them how to feed themselves and how to communicate at the table. That could change the world." Her vision was to transform the school lunch. "With my Montessori training, I thought it should be a hands-on sensual experience-if kids grow it, cook it, and serve it to their friends, they'll want to eat good fresh food. It's a way of communicating through osmosis, in a nonverbal way. Going to the Farmers' market, you learn about seasonality: you see fava beans and learn they're only here in April. I consider this essential information that every kid needs to live on this planet. It's bottomline, it's more important than reading and writing. It's not being taught at home."

With that mission, Waters launched The Edible Schoolyard project. Seven years ago, she raised money from friends and foundations and started the garden classroom and the kitchen classroom in the Martin Luther King Jr. Middle school in Berkeley. It's a good test case because there are 1,000 ethnically and economically mixed kids, in a district that gets special supplements of money because there are so many poor families. It's a cause that has become dear to her heart because 85 percent of American kids don't eat even one meal a day at home with their family. "There is no punctuation in the day, no rituals at the table, no sense of caring. These kids feel very lost and they're asked to eat kids' food-pizza, hotdogs, hamburgers, spaghetti, sweets-and not introduced to anything else. No wonder there is an obesity problem. These kids are hungry for food, but they're even more hungry for love."

Waters concedes that fresh food is more expensive. "But, we have to decide that this is a priority and go from a paradigm of scarcity to one of plenty. We need to put our money into the public school system. I cannot design a program that would fit into the paradigm of scarcity because I don't believe in it-I think it's immoral. Still, I'm not extravagant, I've come up with dishes that are inexpensive, nuritious, delicious."

Besides, sustainable funding is available because there is concern about agriculture, and health foundations are eager to fund the project. "If we buy food from local organic growers, we could change agriculture overnight. We'd develop this peasant cuisine-inexpensive delicious food. People go to McDonald's for cheap food because they don't know how to cook. When we ask kids to write their favorite recipe, they talk about unpacking tortillas or a lasagna mix and microwaving it."

Now, The Edible Schoolyard is building a cafetaria because new schools in Berkeley have no place for kids to eat. "Children eat outside under eaves of the building, the food is served from a table in the gym, they haul in the food in plastic bags from a central kitchen. No wonder the kids don't want to eat, they go to a fast food place after school."

All of Waters's passions have come full circle with The Edible Schoolyard: the victory garden, Montessori education, fresh produce, simple food, an intense hatred of fast food (she refers to McDonald's as "an insiduous conspiracy") and a deep concern for children that stems from her role as the mother of Fanny, her only child. Fanny has recently gone to college and Mama Waters has followed: she has taken The Edible Schoolyard to Yale University where the administration is eager to introduce its curriculuum this fall. Yale undergrads-and Fanny-will be eating California cuisine, not quite a la Chez Panisse, but certainly a far cry from institutional dorm food.