My favorite new snack food is an old nemesis of mine. I never thought I'd find anything nice to say about mulberries; in my book, they're literally for the birds. Every summer we get bombarded by bland, seedy berries from the five mulberry trees in our yard; the birds love them, but they leave a layer of rotting, fermented mulberries spread across the driveway like good jam gone bad.

I've tried to put the berries to good culinary use. After all, Alice Waters calls mulberries "sublime," and I know people who've had her mulberry ice cream and swear it was delicious. My mulberry ice cream was a seedy disaster. I made a pie, too; it wasn't so bad, but anything tastes good if you add enough sugar. It's true that some varieties of mulberries taste better than others, but we've got three different kinds, and they all seem to lack flavor.

The gossip in gastronomic circles last week centered on a half-baked hatchet job on Alice Waters that ran in the New York Times Style magazine recently.

The premise of San Francisco chef Dan Patterson’s piece – that Water’s influence has created some kind of Tyranny of the Simple and Seasonal that’s stifling culinary creativity among Bay Area chefs – generated plenty of buzz along with a rebuttal or two, of sorts, from the blogosphere.

Berkeley rolled out the red carpet for the green Prince last Monday when Charles and Camilla stopped by the Martin Luther King Jr. Edible Schoolyard, where kids grow organic vegetables and cook healthy meals under the auspices of Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse Foundation.

Prince Charles, long an ally of sustainable agriculture, also took his newly minted missus to an organic farm and several farmers’markets in Marin County. Camilla deviated from the path of royal restraint, sampling everything from heirloom apples and wild salmon to organic cheese and wine.

A crumb of organic pizza on Camilla’s not-so-stiff upper lip had the British press clucking their collective tongue, but the Duchess clearly won herself a whole new set of fans on this side of the Atlantic. Diana called her the Rottweiler, but to the Californians she charmed, Camilla was nuthin’ but a chowhound.