Food is about more than how you make it or what it tastes like. Maybe the most important thing is who you eat it with. One of the things I miss most living in Boston is cooking with and for our extended family, with all the people who hang out at the house in Kitsilano and cook with us, eat with us, talk around the table or out in the garden. It has always been a diverse group and the house rule is that if you are at the house when dinner comes around you are welcome to stay for dinner but you have to (i) help in some way and (ii) sit down with the rest of us.
Eat Drink Man Woman is one of the great food films. It is by director Ang Lee (who also did Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon) and is set in Taiwan where a widowed, aging master of Chinese cooking and his three daughters come to terms with themselves, their sexuality (food and sex go together) and each other. The second daughter Jia-Chien and her father have an especially wrought relationship. She is the one who is the most like him, and who can cook, though at the beginning of the film he is the one who cooks, his daughters eat. But he is losing his sense of taste and working by instinct, an instinct that is not always on. At the end of the film, Jia-Chien cooks for him and for the first time he can taste what she is serving (I know it is a bit sappy, but it works for me). I can see elements of this in my relationships with all three of my kids.
The first scene, before the credits, where Master Chu is preparing Sunday dinner for his daughters is a wonderful montage of Chinese cooking. Watch carefully and you will see how much we all have to learn about ingredients, knife skills and the many layered ways to cook things. The part where he inflates the duck (or is it the chicken) is priceless.
We are happy to add posts on other films (and books, songs, poems ...) to this blog so send them in.
