If, as the saying goes, we are what we eat, then we are more and more likely to be organic, local, fresh, and possessed of a pungent flavor. Much of the reason for this is the effort of restaurateur Alice Waters and the revolution in consciousness that she helped create with her famous restaurant, Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, Calif. In his new book, “Alice Waters and Chez Panisse” (Penguin Press, 380 pages, $27.95), Thomas McNamee tells us how it all happened.

In the late 1960s Ms. Waters was involved in a different type of revolution. She was caught up in the Free Speech Movement that turned the University of California on its head. When students began to be arrested, Ms. Waters, whose ideology was probably more reflexive than considered, decided that an opportunity to study at the Sorbonne was simply too good to pass up.

It was romance that took her to Paris, a romance with French culture and language, and the allure of French men. But as with M.F.K. Fisher and Elizabeth David before her, for Ms. Waters the experience of France bloomed into a romance with French cooking that determined the course of her life. As she told Mr. McNamee in an interview, “When I got back from France … I wanted hot baguettes in the morning, and apricot jam, and café au lait in bowls, and I wanted a café to hang out in, in the afternoon, and I wanted civilized meals, and I wanted to wear French clothes. The cultural experience, that aesthetic, that paying attention to every little detail — I wanted to live my life like that.”

And so in August 1971 Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse, taking its name from a character in one of Marcel Pagnol’s films. It was not an entirely auspicious beginning, since no one involved had any restaurant experience. Staff members were graduate students, artists, poets, and musicians. Yet the anticipation was great, since Ms. Waters had already established a reputation as a cook. Although the first night was nearly disastrous, Chez Panisse soon became the place to eat in Berkeley.

The vision and style that have made Chez Panisse so unique were slow to form. Ms. Waters seldom cooked at the restaurant and she had a series of chefs who often left their own singular imprint on the cuisine, like the flamboyant Jeremiah Tower, whose culinary extravagance was often at odds with Ms. Waters’s simpler preferences.

But gradually her own sense of taste righted itself and she realized that it was the simple flavors of locally grown foodstuffs that was central to her original experience of French food. She hired people to forage for her, and local small farmers grew produce to her specifications. The restaurant received the imprimatur of the famous American chef and food writer, James Beard, who when he ate there said, “This is not a real restaurant,” meaning, his companion said, “it was a home that took in money for food.” In 1980 the Café at Chez Panisse opened upstairs, offering choice and a less expensive menu, in contrast to the restaurant’s famous fixed menu and soaring prices.

Alice Waters’s vision made itself felt in the community when she encouraged local schools to grow their own vegetables and wean students off junk food. The Edible Schoolyard Project gave children a hands-on knowledge of food and the joys of the table, with the students “raising, harvesting, cooking, serving and eating” their own produce. The same philosophy was brought to bear on Yale University, where she and her daughter, Fanny, established the Yale Sustainable Food Project.

Ms. Waters is an unlikely revolutionary. She is a waiflike and appealing gamine with an engaging smile, who, with her cloche hats and period clothing, looks as if she is playing dress-up with Mommy’s wardrobe. And she is an unlikely chef. She never went to a cooking school and never went through the process of apprenticeship common to most chefs. She has only intermittently, and with reluctance, taken over the kitchen of Chez Panisse. But she is a woman with an iron will who, as she says, “lives through her senses.” Ms. Waters has an unerring and exquisitely discriminating palate. That will and palate are responsible for the phenomenon we know as “California cuisine.”

Mr. McNamee’s chatty narrative tells us a little more than we may want to know about Chez Panisse and the people who have been involved with it. But this book about a truly remarkable woman and her restaurant will be fascinating to anyone with an interest in food and Berkeley’s strange evolution from an outpost of radical politics to the home of the good life and the pleasures of the table.

Mr. Volkmer regularly reviews books and classical music for the Southampton Press.