What Is The Sound Of One Hand Sautéeing? | Edward Brown reveals the secrets of Buddhist cuisine in How to Cook Your Life.
Find It...
HOW TO COOK YOUR LIFE
Directed by Doris Dörrie. Featuring Edward Brown. Mar 7-10. Metro Cinema (Zeidler Hall, The Citadel).
3 1/2 Stars
At one point in How to Cook Your Life, a question is posed: “How can you tell if an egg comes from a happy chicken?”
And then of course, we’re asked the obvious follow-up: “What does a chicken need to be happy?”
If questions like these strike you as, at best, irrelevant to kitchen work, How to Cook Your Life probably isn’t for you.
This slow, meditative documentary about chef/Zen master Edward Brown, who teaches and cooks at San Francisco’s Tassajara Zen Center, is suffused with questions and unusual observations like those, and while the answers are sometimes cheeky (What does a chicken need to be happy? “A rooster!”), they are, more often than not, a mix of Zen platitudes and metaphorical aphorisms.
Brown’s beatific face lights up the whole film, but director Doris Dörrie doesn’t look to him as some kind of enlightened Buddhist master with infinite wisdom and patience. Though he does seem to be a preternaturally calm guy, we get a sense of how difficult and fraught his journey to inner peace has been, both through his own stories about his younger life, and through footage of his infrequent—and therefore all the more surprising—emotional outbursts. (He gets pissed off in a very un-Zen manner when someone forgets if they salted a dish, and tears up as he reminisces about the beauty of some old teapots.) Overall, though, he’s such genial guy that I wanted to know more about him, and how he got that way. A little more biographical sketching-in would have been nice.
The most surprising thing about How to Cook Your Life is how it mostly avoids falling into superficiality. After all, a documentary about Zen gourmands in California sounds like the ultimate trip into New Age navel-gazing. But whether Dörrie is interviewing Brown, a dumpster diver, an organic farmer, or the homeless men fed by the Tassajara Center, everyone comes off as genuine and thoughtful about why they live the way they do. There are occasional lapses into cliché, especially when we get around to talking about the fast pace of modern life and the alienation wrought by technological society and our disconnect from the means of production.
But Brown’s hypotheses, familiar or not, are unsettling to contemplate: labour-saving devices and processed food mean we hardly have to work at all for our sustenance anymore, but what do we sacrifice for convenience? Taste and nutrition, obviously, but maybe, Dörrie implicitly suggests, our happiness as well. For Brown, food is not fuel for a busy nine-to-five life; it is life. For a Buddhist, our actions are not a means to an end, they are an end in themselves. So, Brown seems to suggest, if we no longer have to work to provide for ourselves, if we no longer have to do anything to fulfill our basic needs, what does life mean?
That’s a question I ask even as I finish up this review and head off to heat up a TV dinner... seriously.
Post the first comment: (Login or Register)