With her longstanding Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse, Alice Waters has indelibly influenced how we eat in the United States. For the past 30 years, the chef and seasonal produce enthusiast has also run the Edible Schoolyard Project, an educational initiative which teaches schoolchildren gardening, stewardship, and cooking and increases access to fresh, local food. This work has informed Waters’s newest book, A School Lunch Revolution, which offers recipes from her Edible Schoolyard work and argues for a system in which schools buy food directly from farmers instead of through middlemen.

It comes at a timely moment: Cafeteria food is an ongoing subject of political debate, especially in Waters’s home state of California, which has new legislation that will phase certain ultra-processed foods out of school meals in California and also sets parameters around what ingredients can be served. Here, Waters explains why the meals we serve to public school students matter and why it’s worth rethinking how school food is sourced.

Eater: Coming from restaurants, what drew you to school lunch and wanting to get involved with it?

Alice Waters: I’ve been, of course, very worried about climate change and very worried about public education and I know that food has got the power to make change. I thought about school lunch and how it could be done affordably, and how we could change from buying food from a distributor that’s coming, basically, from around the world and instead do what Chez Panisse did way back when and buy food directly from the farmers.

In every other country, people have a greater respect for farmers and for teachers. I thought that if we could feed the next generation local, organic, regenerative food without the Sysco middleman, [then] we could pay the farmers the real cost and they would want to grow and bring food to the schools.

If we are going to address climate and inspire the next generation, we really should focus on food. [Schools are] the only place that has that universality. School is something that is very, very predictable and in order to really teach the values of our democracy, we need to sit at a table together.

Governor Gavin Newsom recently signed a law regarding school food. How do you feel about the approach of legislating nutritional value?

No question, we need to legislate what we’re feeding our children — no more fast food with preservatives and grown poorly and all of that. It’s so important for the health of the nation that we do this. The people who have the power to make that change need to do it.

From your work with kids and schools, what’s the best way to get kids to be more open-minded and curious eaters?

Well, they eat together. They’re all at the table, and if one kid says, “This is really good,” they all taste it. The Edible Schoolyard Project has really changed the attitudes of kids around food. Montessori believes that our senses are the pathways into our minds. I was a Montessori teacher and I really believe that. If you’re teaching in the kitchen classroom and the kids are learning about the geography of Japan and they’re rolling their own sushi, then they remember their lesson really well.

In A School Lunch Revolution, you write that there’s a disconnect between food and “kid food.” Why do you think that exists?

Families don’t eat together anymore. Everybody’s too busy to do that and it takes too much work for a parent to do that, even to make lunch. That’s part of just wanting food to be fast, cheap, and easy, and that comes from our government and from food distributors who are trying to make money.

It’s really important for the climate that we’re growing organic, regenerative foods and it’s important for the farmers who grow them that we’re paying them the real costs. And what could be better to do this than the public school system globally?

What inspires you about the food world right now?

What inspires me always is the interest in farmers. They could make a really good living by growing food and selling it at a reasonable price to the schools. They need that predictability. You’ve seen how successful farmers markets have been across the country. I purposely called this “school-supported agriculture” because I think the same effect could happen in schools. [At Chez Panisse,] we’ve always bought directly from a farm and the farmer wanted all of our compostable material and they would use it to enrich the soil. It’s a win-win for everybody.

The biggest goal [of A School Lunch Revolution] is that [school-supported agriculture] could be a global movement to address the climate, and that once students learn about this in school, they’ll want to do it at home [too]. Slow Food and a lot of organizations that are focused on food are very excited about the potential of schools being the economic engine for this idea.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.