This past Xmas, my overly generous parents spoiled me with some gift certificates for Amazon. I'm sure that I'm not alone in my triple addiction to movies, music and books. So, the exuberant thrill of receiving that ubiquitous Amazon box must also be a fairly universal experience. My cats share my excitement, albeit in a "box hab" (CuteOverload slang for "box rehabilitation") sort of way. All cat owners know about their pets' amusing fondness for cardboard boxes, an instinctual remnant of their wild ancestors who felt safest living in burrows.My Amazon wishlist never seems to get shorter, partly because of the abundance of mouth-watering cookbooks that smart publishers have been cranking out year-round. At the top of my list are Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's "River Cottage" series of books. I've mentioned him before and the River Cottage URL has always been in my list of favorite links.
The very first time I learned of Whittingstall was when I was channel-surfing and came across an episode of one of his TV shows. In the program, he tried to convince junk-eating, bargain-shopper city dwellers that locally-grown organic produce and contented livestock were well worth the few extra quid for the improvements in taste, health-factor, sustainability, and ethical responsibility. I liked his gentle demeanor and unwavering conviction, even as he was demonstrating the slaughter of his own livestock. Now that's a tough sell, especially to the faint-hearted who have never stopped to think that the baby back ribs that they so love to eat come from adorable creatures who look like "Babe". But his arguments were well-grounded and certainly made a believer out of me.
The same conviction comes through in the books I ordered: "The River Cottage Cookbook" and "The River Cottage Meat Book". Within seconds of opening the "Meat Book", I was thoroughly absorbed by the opening chapters on his decision to raise and eat his own livestock. It will never turn around a die-hard vegetarian or vegan who thinks it's absolutely wrong to be eating animals. But it will give meat-eaters a deeper awareness of how much power and responsibility they hold in driving the market towards free-range, organically raised livestock. As long as people keep buying the cheap stuff, the market will continue to sustain inhumane, industrial forms of animal farming.However, the books are not all rhetoric. There are plenty of gorgeous recipes inside. I like them for their rustic simplicity. You won't find any pretentious haute cuisine in here; just good home cooking. I'm a little intimidated by the recipes for headcheese -- it will be very freaky to bring home a whole pig's head from the butcher's. I'm not sure I would even know where or how to start carving. But I hope to try it some day.
Another item I ordered was the DVD of "How to Cook Your Life". I hadn't seen it before; I bought it solely on the strength of director Doris Dörrie, whose "Enlightenment Guaranteed" is one of my most favorite indie films, about a pair of German brothers seeking Zen in Japan. "How to Cook Your Life" is a documentary about Zen priest and chef, Edward Espe Brown from the Tassajara Mountain Centre in California. Brown has been cooking food at the monastery for over 40 years and has published a seminal book on bread baking called, "The Tassajara Bread Book".This film isn't about cooking or recipes, per se. It's about approaching food with the same kind of mindfulness that Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall endorses at the River Cottage. One of the Zen practitioners at the monastery says, "We're cooking the food, but in terms of practice, the food is cooking us." In other words, the act of cooking teaches many life lessons such as patience, awareness, adaptability, generosity, and so on.
The film may not hold interest for a general audience, who I suspect will find it too slow. To someone who thinks and feels profoundly about food, this is a calm meditation on our daily bread.
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2 comments:
Let me know what the DVD is like. I also loved Enlightenment Guaranteed, ah that was two years ago when you loaned it to me - it was a bad time, but the movie made me happy :)
The documentary is pretty good, although like I said in the post, it's probably slow for most filmgoers. I was tired the first time I played it so I fell asleep about halfway through. But that says more about how tranquil the film's subject is, not how bad it was. I watched it again when I was more alert and enjoyed it.
My only complaint is the part near the middle where the director seems to be making hippie, preachy propaganda about banishing all consumerism of food. She features a nutty woman in California who proudly declares that she hasn't had to buy groceries in years then goes around stealing produce from other people's properties. When a property owner complains, she makes them out to be villains. Come on.
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