Food activist, author, and Chez Panisse owner and onetime chef Alice Waters will be one of the ten recipients next week of the 2014 National Humanities Medal, as she just announced on Twitter. President Obama will be handing out the medals at noon Pacific time (3 p.m. ET) on Thursday, September 10, and we'll all be able to watch the ceremony live from our desks via the White House website.

Waters opened her only, highly influential Berkeley restaurant in 1971, but at the time it was just a red-checkered-tableclothed Italian affair, and a hangout for her bohemian friends. It wasn't until the late 1970s and early 1980s, partly via her own love of the farm-to-table food culture of southern France and partly via the influence of other chefs she hired, like Jeremiah Tower, that the restaurant began making a name for itself as a nexus of a new "California Cuisine."

She subsequently became one of the faces of the organic food movement, and in more recent years has been a vocal proponent of educating children around the growing and eating of healthy food through her Edible Schoolyard Project, which now boasts a network of thousands of schools around the globe sharing and creating an "edible education" curriculum.

The National Humanities medal honors individuals or organizations "whose work has deepened the nation’s understanding of the human experience, broadened citizens’ engagement with history and literature or helped preserve and expand Americans’ access to cultural resources.” Joining Waters on this year's roster of honorees are a number of prominent writers, including Annie Dillard, Larry McMurtry, and Jhumpa Lahiri.