Official Synopsis:
Zen Master and Renowned Chef Edward Espe Brown is captured on film as he guides students through the mastery of cooking and the importance of how we treat our food. Heartwarming, insightful and often surprising.
  
Our Take:
I am thoroughly confused. I do not know if this is a cooking show video, as it is professed to be, or a lesson in Zen philosophy or a … I don’t know what.

How to Cook Your Life starts out like it might be a cooking show, albeit without the personality of Rachel Ray or the Iron Chef, but then it just zig-zags into more tangents than a geometry teacher. There is video of group discussions about things that I’m still not 100 percent sure what the subject was. Although I must say that Chef Brown did drop a few thought bombs; the sort of things where I had to rewind the DVD to listen again to what he said and realized he had probably said something pretty profound.

As my mind tried to assimilate the thoughts, I became distracted by old film footage of an Oriental (Buddhist?) speaking, with English subtitles. Then, we were back in the kitchen, cooking meals for delivery to junkies and other street people not served by traditional soup kitchens. The show is as much a hodge-podge of stuff as the food served by the zen outreach service. Ughh!

There are no extras included with the DVD.

I might have liked How to Cook Your Life back in the ‘70s, when I was in an altered state of mind a lot, but it’s just confusing to me now. Rent with trepidation.

Overall Picture:
Movie: C-
DVD: C-

- Tony Gray

Staff Writer