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To me, this movie is perfection.

Powerful

Don't listen to the negative reviews

Best movie of this year hands down!

Famed cookbook author Edward Espe Brown takes the old adage "You are what you eat" to a whole new level. For this master chef/Zen priest believes you must actually become "one" with your food (and, as it turns out, with your utensils as well) if you are to ever attain true wholeness of body and spirit in this life. Brown has been conducting courses on how to combine the art of meditation with the art of cooking for decades now, and the documentary "How to Cook Your Life" by German filmmaker Doris Dorrie (who went on to make the superb Zen-flavored drama "Cherry Blossoms" a year later) enrolls us in one of those courses - though we don't get any actual credit for the class and, what's worse, we don't get to sample any of the food.Food for Brown has become a way of life - a spiritual and religious experience, as it were, a means of nurturing the soul as well as the body, of becoming one with nature. And the more organic and less processed that food is the better.Brown spends much of the time in the course dispensing words of wisdom on how to live life in greater harmony with the world around us, with food and cooking as the primary means of achieving that goal (let it be noted that the seminar takes place in a beautiful bucolic center in rural California). And if the philosophizing gets to be a bit too much for you after awhile - as it did for me - and Brown seems more like a self-aggrandizing drama queen than an enlightened master at times (the crying over a teapot - and not even a broken one at that - is a bit much), you can at least savor all the tasty morsels that have been lovingly arrayed for our delectation.Though, come to think of it, with his endless chatter and ceaseless pontificating, Brown puts us in mind of yet another popular expression: "How about a little less gab and a little more grub?"

I did not find his impatience with his followers to be zen at all. When Mr. Brown snapped at the people for not knowing how much salt was needed for the bread and then had the audacity to "ting" the little bell as they all dropped everything they were doing, I laughed. Imagine supposed grown adults being that afraid of someone that seems rather insane. I had to laugh. I mean, really, he cried when he wanted a sponge to clean his cutting board. I can say that I learned a very tiny amount of knowledge on a subject that I basically knew almost nothing about and I feel that I still don't. Too bad. I was willing to watch and learn with an open mind; however, I feel that I opened it and there was very little information that was worth the effort. He speaks of the pursuit of oil in the world that is used to produce, process and deliver food that each of us could make on our own. Without oil, he would not have these nice "retreats" available because someone had to build them and his cookbook would not get very far without people printing and delivering it. The film left me with a feeling that I could have spent that time doing something that was more productive...such as sleeping.

A grown man cries over tea pots. That's one of the few highlights in this rather bland movie. I was interested in more of the political aspects of the film like the woman who hadn't bought groceries in 2 years and liberated fruit off the property of ...(read more) Bush voters. Very nice.Instead of having a nut-job like Chef Ramsey hosting a show like "Hell's Kitchen", FOX should get the Zen chef. He's just as insane but a much more likable way. Unfortunately this wasn't the right medium for his insanity and we feel more embarrassed for him on camera than entertained. I also wasn't left with much more of a knowledge of zen which I was truly hoping for here.

A quirky Zen leader, a couple followers who are way to interested in what he's saying and a load of other subtly absurd details make this film hilarious if you don't want to take it serious. You can enjoy this as a primer to Buddhism but you can also laugh at it as a showcase of some nutty Americans who might be slightly mistranslating the deep history of a foreign religion. Some scenes are so out of place like all of a sudden the cameras follow people scavenging for food and talking about the connection between American wastefulness and the Iraq war...you'll find half your brain going, "Hmmmmm, interesting" and the other half going "WTF are their talking about?"