American chef, restauranteur, food activist and author Alice Waters has received the 2015 Alex Szekely Humanitarian Award. Deborah Szekely, owner of Rancho la Puerta, presented Waters with the award at the ISPA Expo & Conference in Las Vegas.

“I admire that she fights for all the good causes,” said Szekely, in presenting the award.

In accepting the award, Waters said that Szekely has been an “amazing mentor” to her, and the award was particularly meaningful as it honoured Deborah’s son Alex, who Waters described as “a true visionary who dedicated so much of his life to improving other people’s lives.”

Waters, who has been a pioneer in the organic food movement, also runs the Edible School Project, which integrates the growing and cooking of food into the core curriculum of childhood education. Just last month, US President Obama awarded her the National Humanities Medal.

Waters said she thinks of herself as a cook and a teacher, and when she first heard that she was to receive the Alex Szekely award, she didn’t quite see the connection with spas. Then, she said, she reflected back to her first trip to Rancho la Puerta and the “deep ecological understanding” she felt there.

“I realised Deborah and her family were wanting to do a version of what we are doing at Chez Panisse (her California restaurant),” said Waters.

“We want to help people discover better ways of being, from way down inside themselves. It awakened me to the broader possibilities that spas could provide...We’re all trying to do the same thing here.”

Waters also reflected on an experience she had in her 20s, when she visited a Turkish bath house.

“Once you went underground to the sanctuary of this bath house, it was all different,” she said. “It felt so communal, so safe – so connected.”

But the thing that struck her most, she said, was at the end, as she sat in the transition area, and a woman offered her a bright red apple, and said ‘Eat this, it will help.’

It was a profound moment for Waters.

“Eating that apple and savouring it in that space not only nourished me, but grounded me,” she said. “Tasting that apple engaged my senses. I felt completely alive, solid and whole, as if I’d almost been rewired, and I had a deeper understanding of and connection to my interior self.”

Waters suggested that food plays an important role not just in our day-to-day lives, but also in our places of rejuvenation, and that spas have an incredible opportunity to “edibly educate” people.

“People always think it’s the food at Chez Panisse – and it is – but it’s also about how food opens them up to everything around them,” she said.

She said that food should be “real, vital and locally-sourced – just picked if possible – organic of course."

“It doesn’t need to be fancy,” she added. “What was so great about that experience in Turkey was that it wasn’t rarified…Food becomes a catalyst for the deeper changes we’re all trying to foster, and hope our clients foster on their own.

“The simplicity, authenticity and integrity – these are the real luxuries, and the lessons I took to my own life,” she said.

Waters said she feels a need for more social places for rejuvenation that everyone can participate in for a ritualised pause in the day – similar to the Turkish bath house she visited so many years ago.

“They’ll think they’re coming in just to relax – as I did in Turkey – and they’ll be reborn.”