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Sharon Meyers brings international journalistic experience to For Her Information magazine, having published five books and a lifestyle magazine, and promoting corporate and government issues in the media across Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Now back in Chicago, she currently serves as department editor and writes select features for the magazine.

For more than thirty years, Alice Waters has remained simply inspired by what she terms “the right ingredients and the conviviality of the table.” Her latest book, Keeping It Simple, reflects both her joy in simplicity and her evolution as an author. Though this is her ninth cookbook, it is the first not to use the name of her beloved Chez Panisse, the restaurant that she opened in Berkeley, California, in 1971. Keeping It Simple offers intriguing content as both an instructive guide for novice cooks and as a reference book for serious cooks.

Alice has always been ahead of the culinary curve with her self-named “delicious revolution,” from Chez Panisse with its garden to table approach to dining, to her Edible School Yard project where students grow their own food, then learn to cook and eat it together.

As she explained during the recent Harvest Dinner Celebrating Midwest Artisinal Foods at Chicago’s Kendall College, “It is all about respect: Respect for the food we eat and those who grow it. It all starts with the love of the freshest ingredients. When you have the best and tastiest ingredients, you can cook very simply and the food will be extraordinary because it tastes like what it is.”

Though this particularly event was billed as an “intimate evening with Alice Waters,” more than 120 guests reserved seats for the evening. Still, her message and delivery were as intimate as sitting down at the dinner table together with this legendary author, named the most influential figure in American cuisine in 30 years by Gourmet magazine.

She readily admits, “Good cooking is no mystery. You don’t need years of culinary training or rare and costly foodstuffs or an encyclopedic knowledge of world cuisines. You need only your own five senses and good ingredients."

The author considers that this latest book is for anyone who wants to learn to cook or become a better cook. It starts with the basics of stocking a pantry and selection of a menu, then continues in subsequent chapters with essential cooking techniques and detailed explanations. The second half holds recipes selected for their relation to the techniques of earlier chapters. Alice wrote this book lovingly and perhaps longingly, as her Slow Food Nation mantra has not moving ahead in the US as quickly or strongly as she would like, or that as she strongly admonishes, “this country needs.”

Yet, that does not mean she will stop in her quest. “Alice is what slow food does—good clean pure food and our right to enjoy it,” noted the current President of Slow Food during her recent visit to Chicago.

She reflects, “That first trip to the Paris markets as a student when I was just 19 has never left me; the journey is not over. I want people to have a good time at the table. I want to change the food if it’s not tasty. It’s a beautiful thing to offer what you have. The US does not have these culinary traditions, so we need to build this in the US within the context of beauty and meaning, nature and culture. This is an asset of values versus digesting whatever is fast, cheap and easy. This extends to our own culture versus just food. Slow food is alike a really good perfume, a pure essence—someone who is cooking something that smells so good, with conversations that really interest me. That’s where I want to be.”

Her recent book continues the approach to food that was once so radical in US culture, and continues to be a political act: Celebrating the table, defending the right to good food in good company. As Alice herself summarizes, “It’s all about the simple principle of pleasure.”

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