How to Cook Your Life

By Leah Shafer, Associate Professor of Media and Society at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. As a graduate student she helped create marketing materials for the first year of FLEFF in 1997., February 10, 2022

A story of a film, local food, and staying warm

On the night I saw Doris Dörrie’s How to Cook Your Life (2007), snow drifts lined the sides of Home Dairy Alley.

Students, scholars, and community members packed the old Cinemapolis basement theater. After the cold darkness of the Ithaca winter, it felt fantastic to be ensconced in such a warm and dynamic crowd.

How to Cook Your Life is a documentary about Zen teacher, baker, and author Edward Espe Brown. The film follows Brown as he offers cooking classes in Buddhist centers from Austria to California. The homey, stocked kitchens of the Zen centers are filled with produce and with sustainable, intentional activity. Brown and his students cut carrots and knead bread and wash dishes and laugh and meditate together.

The documentary argues that Zen meditation and kitchen work are activist practices of paying attention, being present, ongoing learning, and caring for the planet.

Dörrie captures Brown’s playful Zen practice in a series of segments, each introduced with a koan-like intertitle like “Fiasco” or “Free Your Hands!” superimposed on a luscious close-up image of fruits or vegetables.

In a sequence entitled “Cutting Through Confusion,” Dörrie juxtaposes Brown speaking calmly to his students about resisting aggression by bringing things into their hearts with a scene of him angrily poking, twisting, and stabbing at a recalcitrant plastic wrapper on a block of cheese.

Leah Shafer

I have thought about that sequence nearly every week since I saw it, fifteen years ago.

The documentary draws vital connections between Brown’s spiritual practice and the politics of food waste and commercial farming.

The FLEFF post-screening event featured local food activists. Julie Jordan, cookbook author and onetime owner of the storied Ithaca vegetarian restaurant The Cabbagetown Café, spoke eloquently about community food cultures.

Gary Redmond, the owner of Regional Access, joined Jordan. As we learned, Redmond’s company is an ecologically responsible, grassroots-oriented food distributor whose sustainable practices and focus on local foods supported the burgeoning New York farm-to-table food movement.

FLEFF’s Gastronomica programming stream, of which How to Cook Your Life was a part, explored food culture as a vital nexus of political, social, and ecological concerns.

As a freshly minted professor who had just that summer eaten kale for the first time, attending this event made material for me the intersections between everyday life and the larger world.

When I think back on that screening, and its continuing resonance on me, I realize that the intertitle before that indelible scene can be read as “cutting through confusion.”

Activism isn’t just solving problems. It’s continuing to work in all situations. No matter what is happening, you should keep cutting.

For me, FLEFF works as a through line.

It has allowed me to meet the confusion and chaos of the past twenty-five years with a sustaining action. It continues to offer a warm community of students, scholars, filmmakers, writers, activists, and community people taking action.

And it continues to offer the experience of coming in from the cold.

FLEFF: A DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENT