Watersy politics

Chef Alice Waters, co-founder of Berkeley’s Chez Panisse, said at the Aspen Ideas festival that Barack Obama had the foodie know-how to be the next President. The candidate admitted to not knowing as much about food as he should, she said, but Obama had read Micheal Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”:

“I know that he’s paying attention in a certain way and therefore we have that certain possibility of really offering him advice.”

Waters then suggested forming a set of agriculture and food advisers – a “Kitchen Cabinet” – and holding press conferences at a freshly-formed compost heap on the White House lawn

Like many local food advocates, though, Waters appears to harbor genuinely conservative values, writes John Schwenkler in the Boston Globe:

Set against books like National Review editor Jonah Goldberg's best-selling "Liberal Fascism," which glibly suggests affinities between the organic food movement and Nazi totalitarianism, it is easy to treat views like Waters's simply as a liberal phenomenon. But this is not as it should be: For in her deference to tradition, her focus on community, and her understanding of the role of the family in society it is Waters, not Goldberg, who is giving a voice to genuinely conservative values.