Farm-to-table pioneer Alice Waters opening food institute in Oak Park’s Aggie Square

Chez Panisse founder and farm-to-table pioneer Alice Waters will open a new food institute at UC Davis’ Aggie Square in Oak Park, she announced at a press conference in Sacramento on Thursday.

The Alice Waters Institute for Edible Education at the University of California, Davis will host a range of curriculum related to food consumption and production open to select K-12 and UC Davis students, with programs for other community members as well.

Waters opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley in 1971 with the then-revolutionary idea that ingredients should be produced locally and organically. She’s been vice president of Slow Food International since 2002, written 16 books and received the National Humanities Medal from Barack Obama in 2015.

It’s not Waters’ first foray into Sacramento; she helped start Sacramento High School’s Edible Schoolyard program in 2012 after pioneering a similar initiative at a Berkeley middle school 15 years prior. She’s also long advocated for free lunches across all primary and secondary schools nationwide.

“I hope we can bring local people from this neighborhood and feed them our values and ideas,” Waters told The Sacramento Bee in an interview. “It’s going to take an incredible collaboration to put this all together. I want artists, I want architects, I want people that are unlikely to brainstorm with us, because we can make something greater than the sum of our parts.”

The Alice Waters Institute for Edible Education will work with UC Davis’ School of Education to analyze and try to solve food-related problems such as water use and nutritional ignorance. It will likely include gardens and kitchens for hands-on learning, and host public-facing conferences and summits.

Beyond that, the institute has few set parameters and no projected opening date. But Waters has a couple ideas about what she’d like.

She wants to use natural materials. She wants long tables. A screening room for films about food. A cellar with Italian-style arches to cure and store food. A library of cookbooks. And a large water fountain in front for people to gather around.

“I want it to be beautiful,” she told The Bee. “I want all of the spaces in this institute to be inspiring to work in. I don’t want any back-of-the-house in this place. I want the dishwashers to have tiles that are fantastic, for them to have windows to see out.”

The Alice Waters Institute for Edible Education will be one of three anchor tenants on the 30,000-square foot Market Plaza’s first floor when built. Waters, 75, said she’s planning to tap someone else to run the institute’s day-to-day operations.

Chefs such as Patrick Mulvaney of Mulvaney’s B&L, Kelly McCown of The Kitchen, Brad Cecchi of Canon and Santana Diaz of the neighboring UC Davis Medical Center filled the room alongside Mayor Darrell Steinberg, Assemblyman Kevin McCarty and UC Davis higher-ups.

Vice Mayor Eric Guerra recalled how crop dusters rained chemicals down on him as he worked in fields as a teen. Sacramento’s low-income children should learn the benefits of organic growing, Guerra said, as well as other lessons they might not receive at home.

“Food insecurity that is happening around the Stockton/Broadway corridor is a real thing, and the fact that this is going to be the location, the epicenter of changing that, is a humongous move for Sacramento and humongous move for the kids here,” Guerra said.

Aggie Square will eventually include roughly 500,000 square feet of STEM space, 250,000 square feet of classroom, office and co-working space, 40,000 square feet of community space and 250 multifamily residential units for UCD affiliates across 25 acres. It’s unclear how much space Waters’ institute will occupy.

“The Alice Waters Institute for Edible Education is both a natural development and locally grown,” UC Davis Provost Ralph Hexter said. “Alice and UC Davis have been Northern California neighbors pursuing complementary programs with respect to food for some time. Indeed, the edible revolution that she has sparked has been echoed and reinforced by much of the university’s work in this area.”

This story was originally published January 16, 2020 at 10:00 AM.