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93 minutes - Now in theaters
How to Cook Your Life is a cheerful documentary about the art of cooking and the art of cooking your life without burning it, putting in too much salt or overcooking it.
Food and being determine life, and life determines food. Filmmaker Doris Dörrie and the cooking Zen priest Edward Brown demonstrate that eating is more than just the intake of food. Cooking is a festival of senses, and an act of love and generosity.
During the summer of 2006 Dörrie and her crew filmed Edward Brown at his cooking classes at the Buddhist center Scheibbs in Austria and the two Californian Buddhist centers, the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center and the Zen Center in San Francisco, where he teaches people of all generations how to cook. His recipes are simple but rich in taste and aroma - and they are very much the reflection of his consciousness.
How to Cook Your Life refrains from using any commentary. The camera is like a participant of the cooking courses. It captures the flour-covered wooden table, the dough, the radishes, oranges and carrots. One learns to understand the anatomy and liveliness of yeast: cakes, pizza, bread are being baked. The camera joins the lectures of Edward Brown, which are based on the ancient tradition of Zen master Dogen, the founder of the Soto Zen School. Already in 1283 Dogen wrote a cookbook in which he encourages his readers to discover Buddha in simple kitchen chores, like washing the rice or kneading dough.
Practical and entertaining, Edward Brown knows how to translate those philosophical thoughts into today’s zeitgeist, and he opens up our minds to such questions as, "What is the meaning of cooking and eating for the community and the individual? Is cooking a political act? How does cooking reflect our attitude toward life and the world?"
Edward Brown is a happy priest, but for sure no saint. A recalcitrant bottle of oil, for example, is in for some tough talking to. But for him, the whole world can be found in a watermelon. And in his pots, rivers and mountains are cooked and poured forth transformed.
Dörrie’s camera also catches other glimpses of food and its place in our lives and minds. Fast food restaurants, organic farmers, starving homeless people and a woman who eats from dumpsters, and yet who humorously calls her lifestyle "Back Door Catering," weave their momentary presence in this film, juxtaposing Brown’s teaching and mastery. And Dörrie’s food observations shot around San Francisco reveals the world of our culinary contradictions and diversity. For example eighty percent of Americans don’t eat at home very much - some not at all - and neither do they cook.
What does this say about our society? If you don’t know how to cook and you are poor, you have to live on cheap and bad food. With no time created for cooking and eating together there is a loss of family connectivity that extends deeply into our communities and culture. To learn how to cook means to experience and preserve the richness of one’s connection to life and helps extend that appreciation into our culture and traditions.
How to Cook Your Life is a beautiful film that will change your view on cooking and eating, and it will change your view of your own life. You will never again cut your vegetables the way you used to.
