My Conversation with Alice Waters and Davia Nelson

The December following Katrina (2005), I met Alice Waters at a dinner in NYC. When she heard I was from New Orleans, she said, “Paul Prudhomme saved my career, and I’d like to do something for New Orleans.”

After coaxing that story out of her, which I’ll save for another day, I said, “I support a school with a garden. Let’s bring your Edible Schoolyard to New Orleans.” The Edible Schoolyard is an experiential learning project Alice founded in Berkeley. It’s based on her background as a Montessori teacher before founding Chez Panisse, her world-renowned farm to table restaurant. The educational program, now world-wide, will celebrate its 30th anniversary next year.

Eighteen years after that meeting, we have five Edible Schoolyards in New Orleans. We are proud to be Alice’s most successful satellite.

Davia Nelson is Alice’s best friend and a public radio rock star. A Peabody Award-winning Kitchen Sister, Davia creates oral histories about food, music, and popular culture. She annually interviews film legends at the Telluride Festival.

Davia’s oral history work and Alice’s restaurant career dovetails with my interest in improv. We are all winging it. And as Tom Teicholz wrote in his recent review of Winging It at Forbes, “For the next four years, at least, we’ll all be Winging it.”

In this interview, Alice, Davia, and I wing it for the famed North Beach bookstore, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights, where Allen Ginsberg read a draft of his great improvisation, Howl, in 1955.

You can listen to our conversation here, where we cover improvisation in food, cooking, culture, and politics: