How to Cook Your Life: Challenging the Absence of Environmental Discourse in Celebrity Chefdom

• In Event: Food, Culture, and the Environment: New Directions in Critical Food Studies

Abstract

Beginning with Julia Child, food scholars have marked a shift in the celebrity status of chefs. Since Child’s rise to prominence and fame beginning in the 1950s, other chefs have acquired celebrity status. A diverse range of media help to establish, maintain, and mitigate the status of chefs as stars. As numerous scholars have articulated, television, film, and food magazines have helped to move chefs into mainstream stardom (Mannur, Ray, Julier, Parkhurst Ferguson, and Fine).  Individuals like Anthony Bourdain, Mario Batali, Emeril Lagasse, Nigella Lawson, and Jamie Oliver circulate through diverse mainstream media venues and help to generate discourses of food and cooking that reify dominant Western notions of identity.  In these mainstream representations of celebrity chefs, there is a conspicuous absence of discourses on sustainability and food. This essay discusses German filmmaker’s Doris Dörrie's new English language documentary, How to Cook Your Life, about Edward Espe Brown, a Northern California Zen priest, Tassajara bread baker and cookbook author, and meditation and cooking teacher. In contrast to mainstream celebrity chef representations, How to Cook Your Life film disrupts the discourse on celebrity chefdom by addressing directly the relationship among sustainability, foodways, and chefdom.  In doing so, the film questions mainstream representations of chefs.  As the San Francisco Chronicle writes, “Dörrie and Brown deliver what amounts to a gentle lecture about Americans' eating disorder: We have so much food we don't value it anymore, and the result is we eat too much, we throw obscene amounts of good food away and we waste huge amounts of oil and energy on processing and packaging.” (Ness, 10/21/07). Deliberately linking itself to counter-culture discourses of the 1960s and contemporary concerns about the environmental, political, and social implications of food, How to Cook Your Life depicts a celebrity chef who resists the tropes that have defined stardom in the Western media context.

Author

• Laura Lindenfeld, University of Maine