Alice Waters wasn’t content to start a national revolution around organic and locally grown food. At age 64, she’s 12 years into an encore career to transform the way schoolchildren think about what they eat.

She spends the bulk of her time traveling, speaking and raising funds for her Edible Schoolyard project, which gives children the experience of planting, growing and preparing foods that they share together.

It began, she says, when she had a child of her own. “I started thinking about her future and realized that we couldn’t be an island unto ourselves. We had this little perfect world of food and community, where the values that I think are so important were shared. I thought, ‘We have to educate the population of this country,’” she told L.A. Winokur of The Wall Street Journal.

Waters built a prototype organic garden at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, where children plant and harvest food, create recipes, cook, set tables, share meals, clean up and pile the scraps into compost bins. Since American children spend little time around the table with their families, it is a new experience for most of them – one that she would like every public school in the nation to emulate. She even tried to interest Bill Clinton in planting a garden on the White House lawn when he was president.

Her vision is not really about food, she explains, but to “live in a way that is stimulating and connected to a big picture of how we can share this world.”

And Waters won’t stop until those values are shared nationwide. “I want edible education to become the No. 1 priority in the country. I want to feed every single child in the public school system in America,” she says.