How To Cook Your Life is tasty, if not festive.
The documentary features Zen priest and cookbook author Edward Espe Brown as he prepares food and talks about nourishment for body and soul. The film includes delicious nuggets of wisdom, to be sure, but it left this viewer a bit hungry for more.
How To Cook Your Life shows Brown leading various cooking classes in Buddhist centres in Austria and in California. The film, which opens with a combo of chanting and chopping -- veggies -- can be seen as a long meditation on how food has lost its rightful place in our lives.
How To Cook Your Life unfolds in chapters with thoughtful titles -- "Free Your Hands", for example, or "Fiascos." Early on, Brown talks about visiting his Aunt Alice when he was a little boy and discovering the wonders of home-baked bread. For him, Aunt Alice's bread was proof that something was wrong with the bread one buys at a supermarket; Brown seems to have understood from an early age that lousy food was an indication of trouble in the whole culture. The 'labour-saving' element of prepared food, he says, robs us all of our capacity to do the things that give us vitality -- mix, blend, knead, bake. You can see his point.
Cooking, explains Brown, is like all of life -- if you try to please everyone, you will suffer. He talks about macrobiotic diets, very sharp knives and the Western notion of controlling things.
He offers Zen insight into anger and physical action. He talks about affluence in our society, about wasted food, hunger, feeding the homeless and this: "Treat the food as if it were your eyesight. Don't waste a single grain of rice."
(There are more such insights, some from Brown's mentor, Suzuki Roshi.)
How To Cook Your Life has input from people in Brown's cooking classes, including a young man who talks about learning to kill chickens on a farm, and a woman who dumpster-dives for all her food. She also picks fresh fruit from the 'decorative' trees in posh California gardens. One person will not let her pick the apples from his tree -- the only person on the block, she confides, who voted for Bush.
How To Cook Your Life wants to remind you that nourishing oneself and others is not something that comes from a package, but from the heart. Brown's wisdom about food and cooking quietly extends itself into other areas of life. His parable about old and dented teapots is surely a chat about age and physical imperfection -- two things currently not allowed in Western society.
How To Cook Your Life is slow and gentle, and it sneaks up on you. It ain't War & Peace, but it is the sort of film you'll think about long after you leave the theatre.
(This film is rated PG)
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