Alice Waters and “Objectivity”

By Iron Chef Leftovers

I really don’t like Alice Waters. Yes, she is one of the original eat local/sustainable gurus, but there are few people who are as full of themselves as she is. She loves to name drop and really has the opinion culinarily that she is right and everyone else is wrong.

I bring this up because there is a site, food52.com that holds an annual cookbook competition called “Piglet”. It is basically a head to head competition between 16 books to determine their “Cookbook of the Year”. Each battle is judged by a celebrity chef (red flag right there), with the winner advancing to the next round. This year, the finale was Momufuku Milk Bar Cookbook vs. The Art of Living According to Joe Beef. In case you don’t know, Joe Beef is a restaurant in Montreal (and currently #1 on my list of places that I want to go to eat in North America) and Momufuku Milk Bar is a restaurant in NYC, owned by David Chang, who is equally full of himself as Alice Waters.

I will be honest, I don’t own either book (although I do have Joe Beef on my Amazon Wish List), so I really can’t say which is the better book. My issue is with the comments made by Alice Waters. I figured this competition was in trouble when the write up started this way:

I am always so hopeful that young cooks with a lot of passion and talent will write books that help to transform the North American diet in a positive way. That is why I have to admit that I am more than a little disappointed in the two finalists for this year’s Piglet.

Fine you are disappointed because neither of these books follows your manifesto to the letter. You would think after getting her personal feelings out of the way, she would be a bit more objective. You would be wrong:

Not because the authors are not talented, both obviously are, but because both books seem to contribute to feeding our addiction to sugar and fat.

Thanks for playing Ms. Waters. You just lost all of my respect for falling into the “fat is bad” camp. This is for another post, but fat is not inherently bad for you (it will make you feel fuller quicker, which is why people tend to overeat “low fat” foods) but it of course depends on what kind of fat you are consuming. Do you realize that 1 tablespoon of pasture raised pork fat has more omega-3 fatty acids than olive oil, and don’t even get me started on how much better it is than hydrogenated fats. Fats also allow you to get more nutrients out of your food. Most of what your body needs is fat soluble, and the lack of fat is why many vegetarians end up with health issues, your body can’t process raw vitamin D without the fat to help break it down.

As she continues, she really has nothing positive to say about either book:

Sadly, it is in the ingredients that Milk Bar really loses me — it seems that they don’t have real ingredients in their pantry. I understand the creative appeal of turning something bad into something surprising but I can’t support the choice of highly processed ingredients when fresh and organic ones are increasingly so readily available. Across the board the Milk Bar recipes are too rich, too sweet, and just too intense for me. The fact that “Crack Pie” is their most famous recipe is quite telling.
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Many of the recipes in The Art of Living According to Joe Beef are heavy-handed and high in fat, but not all of them.

Here finally just sent me over the edge:

Appropriately, the decision between who wins the Piglet award this year between Joe Beef and Milk Bar came back to crack, and ultimately, I would rather be building a garden from a den than to be an addict.

So basically, she votes for Joe Beef because of a single story. Nothing to do with how well laid out the recipes are, or the flow of the book, or, putting her feelings aside, how difficult or easy it would be to make the recipes at home for your average cook. There is a reason why Tony Bourdain said, “Alice Waters annoys the shit out of me.” I completely agree with him on that one.