How to Cook Your Life

"How to Cook Your Life" (2007) was on our movies on demand channel. It was one of those days to avoid things -- hotter than ever, humid beyond belief, and well, reading in bed took up most of the day. It was one of those days to embrace things.  This documentary about Edward Espe Brown -- about zen and food -- cooking and cooking one's life -- was perfect. The director -- Doris Dorrie -- is German and a former judge at Cannes. The film includes footage from the Zen Center in San Francisco and its Green Gulch Farm and Tassajara, and of a Zen Center (I think) in Germany (I think). It highlights Brown in various circumstances showing people how to knead bread, washing rice, roll cutting carrots, sitting in full monastic gowns teaching, reading aloud from a book, among other things. He's a bit odd, I confess to thinking as I watched. But then again, who's not? The film includes beautiful shots of plums and of risen dough. Not to mention the most wonderful radishes with faces on them that seem to leap from the screen. Along with Brown one meets what some might call a freegan (someone who gets her food from dumpsters and fruit trees from which she gets permission -- or does not -- to pick) and watches a youngish boy eat with pleasure what he helps to make. 

The film connects to a book I read and reviewed here, Instructions to the Cook: A Zen Master's Lessons on Living a Life that Matters by Bernard Glassman and Rick Fields. Like this book, the documentary refers to Zen Master Dogen (13th century) and a book entitled Tenzo Kyogen (Instructions for the Zen Cook). Turns out there are various commentaries on this -- and it influences a whole range of Soto Zen practices. 

If Brown's name seems somehow familiar, he is the (1970) author of The Tassajara Bread Book and co-author (with Deborah Madison) of The Greens Cookbook. (For those who do not know it, Greens is the well known vegetarian restaurant in San Francisco run by the Zen Center.) Brown has also written a book with a great title (that someday I will find and read) -- Tomato Blessings and Radish Teachings. (Maybe that explains the delightful radishes in the film?) 

How do Zen and cooking connect? Well, partly it is about being present in what you do. Walking while walking. Cooking while cooking. Partly it is mindfulness in cooking. Partly it is just that zen and cooking have a history in US Zen centers that reaches across decades and then from American Zen elsewhere and elsewhen. Something worth being mindful of. And the film is worth watching -- slowly and, perhaps, repeatedly. 

For a discussion of the film, and the Zen of both Brown and the film's director Dorrie, click here. 

For an interview with Brown, click here and, for my idea of a meditation article, click here  for "A Potato Chip Meditation" by Edward Espe Brown.