A young Alice Waters, serving humble pie?

I’ll admit it. I agree with Anthony Bourdain. Sometimes, Alice Waters “annoys the living shit out of me,” too. The Berkeley Brahman, for all of the unequivocal good she has done to promote the cause of healthy and sustainable eating, has had some difficulty talking around the silver foot that occasionally gets lodged in her mouth. Reportedly telling people to deal with high food bills by making “a sacrifice on the cell phone or the third pair of Nike shoes” certainly isn’t the most expedient way to win friends or dispel charges of myopic elitism. And organizing a series of inaugural dinners that celebrate local food by flying in chefs—and ingredients—from all over the country seems a touch, well, out of touch.

But what bothers me as much as Waters’s displays of snobbery and cluelessness is the misogyny that’s been exposed in the fallout from both the dinners and Anthony Bourdain’s comments. Todd Kliman, blogging on the NPR website, summed it all up by writing “Alice Waters was a foodie hero. Now she’s the foodie police.” He then went on to blast her “inflexible brand of gastronomical correctness,” bringing to mind an image of a humorless, dried up schoolmarm—or bra-burning first-wave feminist.

Apparently Josh Ozersky has some trouble distinguishing a sustainable-food pioneer from a ball breaker with a grudge, because there he was Monday on his blog, declaring with endearing hubris that “the truth is that everybody has about had it with Alice Waters.” Really? While it’s nice to have such an authority as Ozersky presume to speak for every last one of us, what’s even more charming is the way he effortlessly lumped Waters together with “the stroller women who run” Park Slope and the “Bay Area matrons” who are apparently out to ruin everyone’s fun with their “priggishness and sanctimony.”

The only thing this post convinced me of is that Ozersky’s angry glee (see his charge that Waters’s “force of self-assurance is a thousand times worse” than that of the average Park Slope mom) is not really about Alice Waters. It’s about women, or more specifically, hating on women who have big mouths, big opinions and big ideas about what’s right and what’s wrong.

Again, I’m hardly a Waters booster, and I think that Bourdain made some good points. But the ease with which Waters has become a target for these kinds of charges—while someone like Michael Pollan, another cosseted Berkeley denizen who has expressed his support for higher food prices and has been every bit as vocal about pressing a local, sustainable agenda, avoids this intensely personal brand of criticism—is suspicious. Something about this smells bad, and it’s not the compost pile.—Rebecca Flint Marx