>> When I first decided to follow my passion for food

and begin working for Neil Perry

at his flagship Rockpool restaurant,

I had no formal qualifications in hospitality and catering.

One day I asked Neil, "Do you think I should go back to school

to get my commercial cookery certificate."

He promptly replied, "Kwong, you don't need

to go to cooking school.

Just learn on the job, stick with me

and read all the Alice Waters books.

[ Audience Laughing ]

Well, I did as I was told.

And the wisdom and inspiration I found between those covers,

including Alice's mantra of local, naturally-grown produce,

community, relationship, connexion, education,

and respect struck a very deep chord with me.

Throughout my childhood,

my mother embodied these same values and her love of cooking

and gathering around the table.

So, Alice's words really rang true for me and they continue

to inform all I do as a cook and a restaurateur.

At her own restaurant in California, Chez Panisse,

Alice pioneered the farm-to-table ethos,

championing locally-produced food

and small-scale sustainable agriculture.

And blazing a trail that changed the way we think about food.

I have been fortunate enough

to experience Chez Panisse several times

and I feel a deep connexion to the place

and what it represents.

I constantly dream of my next visit.

Tireless in her efforts to create a sustainable

and celebratory food culture,

Alice Waters' influence has been profound and far-reaching.

Her Edible Schoolyards programme has reclaimed all those paved

parking lots and turned them back into paradises.

With more than 2,000 Edible Schoolyards across the states

and beyond, she has taken her cause to the White House

where she worked with Michelle Obama

to plant an organic vegetable garden.

And now it seems, Alice has the Vatican

and the G20 leaders in her sights.

[ Applause ]

Called "The Fountain of Inspiration" by Carlo Petrini,

founder of the global Slow Food movement.

She's on a mission to teach us how to embrace

and instil slow food values in a fast food culture.

At the heart of her message is a human desire for connexion.

She encourages us to be a part of an inclusive, uplifting,

completely delicious, and very accessible life experience.

And that's why I believe her message continues to grow.

It is rooted in reality and humanitarian values.

Many of the leading chefs, cooks and slow food pioneers

in Australia have been inspired by her campaigning and writings,

and our burgeoning farmers markets

and educational kitchen gardens have grown form seeds planted

by her Delicious Revolution.

To have the mother of this revolution here

with us this evening is both an honour and a pleasure.

Please join me in welcoming Alice Waters to the stage.

[ Applause ]

>> Thank you so much, Kylie, for that introduction,

even though it was a little exaggerated.

[laughs] Especially around the Pope.

[inaudible] But it's thrilling to finally be here in Australia

and to be speaking at this amazing Sydney Opera House.

I think it's one of the great buildings of the world and full

of hopefulness and energy of this country.

And I'm honoured to be the first speaker of this amazing series.

Even though it's not part of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas

that I've heard so much about, I feel like I am part of that.

I'm going to be sharing some of my own dangerous ideas.

I've been invited to come to Australia

for probably 25 years and, for one reason or another,

I've never been able to find the right moment.

But earlier this year I realised that now was the moment.

For the past ten years, I've been focussed intently

on what is happening in the United States,

and to a lesser extent, what's happening in Europe.

However, I've come to realise

that we are pieces of the same puzzle.

An action in the United States has a reaction

in Brazil or in Mexico.

And the choices made in supermarkets

in London have a consequence in Kenya.

And decisions made in Beijing or Cabra have a global impact.

We're living in a truly globalised world.

Now, it was the French philosopher, Brillat-Savarin,

who said, "The fate of nations depends

on how they nourish themselves."

But if he lived at this moment,

I'm sure he would alter this idea to say,

"The fate of the planet depends on how we nourish each other."

When I heard that climate change was taken off the agenda

of the G8 in Brisbane, I must admit I was shocked.

Perhaps I was not paying attention.

I've always thought of Australia as a place

where the environment is so precious and the climate

so precarious, that you would be our natural leaders.

As a Californian and someone with relationships to hundreds

of farmers going to the worst drought imaginable,

I was alarmed that something so real and so urgent

as global warming could be put aside.

I know about the extraordinary ingenuity

of Australian permaculture.

I've known about it for many, many years.

And I figured that you might be able to help us figure out how

to feed ourselves in the future.

And it seems to me like the food industry in the United States,

that the mining industry here is doing the same thing.

They're pulling the wool over our eyes.

This means that Australia is playing an outside --

sized roll in destabilising the climate

and making agriculture increasingly impossible,

not only here, but all around the world.

But I know I have many kindred spirits here,

and I meet wonderful Australians around the world who are engaged

with the ideas that I hold so dear.

And there are people in film, like Peter Weir

and Warwick Thornton, and actors

like Cate Blanchett and Hugh Jackman.

And he actually -- Hugh Jackman just recently came

to the Edible Schoolyard in Berkley.

Amazing. And they're our friends, of course.

Like Kylie and Maggie Beer, and Skye in London, and Neil Perry.

And new friends like Sean Morant.

And, fortunately David Prior, my brilliant collaborator

and food writer introduced me to Stephanie Alexander.

And I regard her as a powerful ally in edible education

and whose vital work with the Kitchen Garden Foundation must

continue to be supported by politicians.

Or --

[ Applause ]

Or David said that we'll have to confiscate their copies

of The Cook's Companion.

[ Laugh ]

Well, what I want to talk to you tonight about is something

that I've been talking a lot about lately,

in lots of different places

around the country and around the world.

And, though it's not about food and cooking in the usual way,

it's really about them in a larger sense.

I think we can all agree that we face serious issues.

Obesity, diabetes, addiction, depression, pesticide use,

GMO foods, the economy, land use, water use,

fare wages for workers, violence, terrorism,

poverty, and childhood hunger.

The over-arching fear of climate change and the list goes on.

It's overwhelming.

In my opinion, all these dreadful issues we face --

and they are dreadful -- each and every one of them,

all of these issues are really outgrowths of a bigger,

more encompassing thing.

They're consequences of a much more fundamental

and deeply-rooted condition.

One that provides the soil, if you will,

for all the other issues to grow out of.

And by not addressing this deeper, larger,

pervasive condition -- what we're trying to do with all

of our well-intentioned attempts to solve the problems is merely

to treat the symptoms of a diseases without dealing

with the root causes of the disease itself.

And unless we deal with the deeper, more insidious,

systemic condition, all

of our other problem won't really go away.

They'll just come back like weeds that you pulled

from the garden one year and then they're there the next.

So, what is this deep, systemic condition?

The author Eric Schlosser, one of my personal heroes and one

of the great [inaudible] of our times, has pointed out that

in the United States, we live in fast food nation.

Fast food is, sad to say,

the dominant way people eat in the United States.

I'm sure I don't need to tell any of you this.

But what I'm not sure many of you realise, and it's something

that I've just come to recognise myself over the last decade

or so, is that fast food is not only about food.

It's bigger than that.

It's way bigger than that.

It's about culture.

Fast food not only affects our diets,

it also affects our rituals, our traditions, our behaviours.

Our relationships, our expressions.

Laws. Ways of working.

Systems and ways of doing things.

The affects of fast food doesn't just happen

at chain restaurants along freeways

or in malls, or in airports.

It permeates everything; from the way we look at the world

to how we operate in it, to how we see each other.

How we express ourselves.

To the way we do business, to our architecture,

to our entertainment, our journalism.

To how we treat each other.

How we interact with each other, or, in many cases these days,

don't interact with each other.

The clothes we wear.

And what we buy, what we sale.

To our parks, our schools.

Our politics.

And the list goes on.

Fast food culture has become the dominant culture

in the United States and I worry

that it's becoming the dominant culture of the world.

This is the bigger condition;

the soil that I feel all these other problems grow out of.

Fast food culture.

You see, like all cultures, fast food culture has its own set

of values, what I call "fast food values".

And these values saturate our ways of thinking

and doing things so thoroughly, in my mind,

I don't think we even see them anymore.

They're just part of our makeup, part of the landscape,

part of our biology at this point.

I fear, part of our daily lives.

And they completely degrade our human experience.

For example, a fast food value

of the fast food culture is uniformity;

the idea that you should get everything the same wherever

you go.

You know, the hamburger you get in Brisbane should be exactly

like the one you get in Brooklyn.

The t-shirt that you buy

in Los Angeles should match exactly the one you find

in Hong Kong, or there's something wrong with it.

We take this value for granted.

We actually like it a lot.

It thrills us.

It's modern.

It comforts us.

But like all fast food values,

uniformity masks deeper, darker issues.

In this case, I would say the pressure to conform,

the loss of individuality, or the respect for uniqueness.

Even prejudice and control.

All eggs should look the same.

All houses should look alike.

Everyone should behave in a certain way

or there's something wrong with them.

Speed. Speed.

That's another fast food value.

Things should happen really fast; the faster the better.

I have to confess, this is me.

[ Audience Laughing ]

You order it, you want to get it.

You want it, you should have it right then, no waiting.

The faster something's done the better.

When we live like this,

I fear that not only do our expectations become warped,

but we also become easily distractible.

We lose the sense that things take time.

That the best things take time.

Like growing food, or cooking, or learning,

or growing a business, or getting to know someone.