http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org
This comes from there today:
It's the birthday of chef and author Alice Waters, born in Chatham, New Jersey (1944). She was 27 years old with no restaurant experience when she opened Chez Panisse, her Berkeley restaurant centered on fresh, local ingredients. She wanted to create food like that she had experienced in France, where friends sat down together for long meals prepared by generous hosts. But at first, she was a little too generous — in the first year of its operation, Chez Panisse gave away $30,000 worth of wine to guests and staff.
Waters has written 11 books, including her most recent, In the Green Kitchen: Techniques to Learn by Heart (2007). She wrote: "Our full humanity is contingent on our hospitality; we can be complete only when we are giving something away; when we sit at the table and pass the peas to the person next to us we see that person in a whole new way."
I have seen Alice Waters at Farmer's Markets and in the Ferry Building in SF. She is a giving soul, a person of hospitality.