The Alice Waters Rodeo

As you can see, St. Alice dropped in on 60 Minutes:

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A fun game to play is to see how long you can manage to watch, rodeo-steez.* (In this wise, Alice is much like Paula Deen.) How long can you watch?
What is perhaps most interesting is that this a piece of journalism by a major news outlet where the fundamental premise of the feature is incorrect. 60 Minutes calls her "The Mother of Slow Food." Wikifuckingpedia can tell you that, in fact, the movement known as "Slow Food" began a a very specific point in time, when some Italians got together to protest the opening of a McDonald's near a Roman landmark.
The slightly more patient will be rewarded with the news that she has "produced" 8 cookbooks. (Who knows if Michel Foucault ever took a night off from his SF hijnx to drop the whole What is an Author thing on her?)
If you stick around slightly longer, you will learn:

a) Alice Waters actually invented the polio vaccine while working on a rhubarb-blueberry compote for Jonas Salk's birthday.

b) In 2006, she agreed to be sent back in time to kill Earl Butz's mother, thus preventing Americans from becoming the fattest, most diabetic people, like, ever. 

c) Personally stormed the Bastille, then whipped up a delicious Nicoise to feed the mob waiting outside, using dayboat caught tuna.

d) She collaborated on the first draft of Common Sense with Thomas Paine, who was her boyfriend off and on during her freshman year at Berkeley.

Seriously, though, I had been under the impression that having a journalist from 60 minutes show up was a bad, thing, b/c they asked difficult questions. Instead, Lesley Stahl is content to burnish Alice's halo from her new residence amongst the microscopic flora in Alice's large intestine.

More generally, this Obama-era Aliceissance is hard to figure -- she has written letters to presidents. So did Travis Bickle. Influential? Sure. And in a positive way. But in a fairly narrow culinary realm. And she seemed content with that record for a long time, only fairly recently becoming the kind of person whose restaurant is a "temple," and whose entourage constitutes "acolytes." To a degree that is odd for a healthy woman in her mid-sixties, she seems to be setting about establishing her legacy as the sole cause of all positive culinary change during her lifetime.

*As always, Penny Pascal is just another word for Peerless Photoshopping,

Comments

[Paula]

When I was 7 I wrote a letter to the president insisting that women be able to play professional basketball... somehow I think that would go better with the current guy than Reagan. Anyway, can I be on 60 Minutes?

[Marco]

The Cod is Gurgling very well.

[The Gurgling Cod]

@Paula: Who was president when you were 7?
@Marco: Thanks!

[Paula]

@tgc Reagan?

[Fesser]

Yeah, hard to see Reagan pushing for the Zaharaias Project for a female NBA starter by 2010, or anything like that.