Medium Raw

Then she chose to cook Leslie a single egg over a roaring wood fire in her Berkeley home. I don’t know about you, but burning up a couple of cords of firewood for a single fucking egg doesn’t exactly send a message of sustainability to me. I believe the restrictions on wood fires are, in fact, particularly restrictive in Berkeley. I know I can’t have one in Manhattan without a spectacularly expensive combination of bafflers, catalytic converters, filters, and exhaust system, as well as the permits and legal work that one would need before installing them. They’re sensitive about such things in Berkeley—what with half the world’s carbon emissions said to come from wood fires and all. If Alice is cooking eggs like that every morning with her oatmeal and fresh-squeezed orange juice, her neighbors are enjoying the secondhand equivalent of a pack of Pall Malls.

Later in the program, when the action moved over to Chez Panisse, Alice, continuing to fetishize “local” produce, proudly commented on a delivery of brightly colored vegetables from “Chino Farms.” Here, her argument was undercut somewhat by the fact that Chino Farms—last time I looked, anyway, is in San Diego. That’s a nearly twelve-hour drive by truck to Chez Panisse—or an hour or so on a jet plane. Exactly how “local” or “sustainable” is that?

But then, this is kind of par for the course. What’s okay for Alice is…well…different…than what’s okay for you. That was certainly the unmissable (by anyone but Stahl) message of the 60 Minutes segment.

Examine the case of the series of dinners Alice threw in Washington, DC, to celebrate the Obama inauguration. Promoted in the press as an exemplary series of “small” affairs celebrating her sustainable, locavorian values, the thing mushroomed into a five-hundred-dollar-a-plate clusterfuck. In spite of the fact that Washington, DC, has plenty of excellent chefs and cooks of its own, Alice flew in well-known chefs, their crews, and (presumably) many of the ingredients they’d need from all over the country. How much hydrocarbon was released into the atmosphere bringing in these outsiders (clearly better than the local yokels, it was implied) will never be known. But one imagines that the cooks could have been sourced locally with little difficulty.

It’s unfair and nitpicking, but it’s irresistible for me not to point out one particular magic moment at a meal Alice threw with chef Tom Colicchio and cookbook author Joan Nathan. At one point, after taking a bite of food, Nathan started to choke. Waters’s reaction was to charge out into the dining room and inquire if “anyone knew the Heimlich maneuver.” Now, Chez Panisse has been open since 1971, one of the longest-running restaurant successes in America. Alice, it was my understanding, was the “executive chef,” a title that, if nothing else, implies spending a fair amount of your adult life in proximity to the “choking victim” sign ubiquitous (and mandated by law) in every professional kitchen. There’s not an American chef alive who doesn’t have that diagram imprinted on his or her brain. ’Cept’n Alice.

Tom Colicchio, who also has seen more than his share of television studios, certainly knew what to do. He stepped right up, placed his fist in the appropriate area, and dislodged the obstruction, thus saving Ms. Nathan’s life.

Which leads one to the question: Is Alice even a chef? Was she ever a chef—in any conventional sense of that word? I, for one, after reading all the accounts, official and unofficial, of Alice’s career and the history of Chez Panisse, can’t find a single supporting source to verify that she was ever a chef. And yet, year after year, she is described adoringly as such by people who know better.

And if she’s not a chef…well then, who is she? And why is she allowed to annoy me? Why do I listen to her? Why do I care?

There it is again. That faint, mellifluous voice in my head, telling me, “Alice is right.”

Alice…is riiiiight…about…everything…

Granted, this is the same voice that once compelled me to sit repeatedly, for hours at a time, in crowded halls that reeked of poor-quality Mexican weed, watching Hot Tuna. Actually, if the voice sounds like anybody, it’s David Crosby singing “Almost Cut My Hair” (a song about which I am still, in some secret place, uncontrollably sentimental). The voice persists. It tells me, “Fuck reality, man—embrace the Dream. Let your freak flag fly…”