How to Cook Your Life

Reviewer: Maria Komodore
Rating (out of 5): ***½

If you ever thought that Buddhist Zen preachers are unassuming people who hold the secrets to happiness, and who lead quiet lives, devoting themselves to meditation in order to achieve enlightenment, then How To Cook your Life might convince you otherwise. The film's subject, well-known Bay Area-based “zen chef” Edward Espe Brown (a zen preacher himself), appears not only to have achieved relative stardom status, but also to be a successful businessman.

Having studied under Japanese Zen master Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, who ordained Brown as a priest in 1971, the zen chef has traveled all around the US and Europe giving his famous cooking classes and leading meditation retreats, and has also published a number of books (“The Tassajara Bread Book,” and “Tomato Blessings and Radish Teachings”) that, just like How to Cook your Life, fuse the art of cooking with Zen teachings.

German filmmaker Doris Dörrie (Enlightenment Guaranteed), obviously captivated by Brown's personality, follows him around the Bay Area and Austria, and captures him while he gives his combined courses. Alternately funny, smart, and pretentious, How to Cook Your Life presents Brown as a normal human being who experiences a wide range of emotions and is still struggling to find the peace within him.

Although at times the chef's musings sound more like Hallmark greetings, he definitely makes a great subject for a documentary and his (sometimes scary) emotional outbreaks do reveal a sincerity that is both touching and relatable. Of greater value are Brown and Dörrie's remarks about our automated and hyper industrialized society and the way it's keeping our minds separated from our bodies, and alters our understanding of value.

I don't know if How to Cook your Life will make you look at cooking in a completely different light, but it will certainly make you hungry in a most enjoyable way.