Greg Achatz's piece in The Atlantic about losing his sense of taste is indeed quite good, and it justly deserves the mentions it's been getting from food bloggers. But it reminds me of something that's surprised me: given growing interest in food among a lot of Americans, why hasn't there been a revival of critical interest in Eat, Drink, Man, Woman? Ang Lee's third feature as a director, Eat, Drink is one of the best movies made about food, and the opening sequence has to be one of the most beautiful looks at cooking ever filmed.
The movie is about a master chef who has lost his sense of taste, and his struggle to contend with his daughters' impending adulthood. But much more broadly, it's a movie about how food connects people, and how it's a source of power. As the chef loses his sense of taste, the only person who continues to love his now-skewed dishes is a little girl who lives next door, who becomes the star of her class when he begins to make her lunch. The chef's eldest daughter cooks for her lover because she believes her father doesn't want her in the kitchen. The epic meals the chef cooks for his daughters as a means to entice them home get dubbed "the Sunday dinner torture ritual" as his daughters begin to leave home, and to leave the tradition behind. And taste becomes a synonym for emotional capacity. Without a doubt Eat, Drink, Man, Woman is the movie that made me want to learn how to understand food, not simply because of how it would taste, but because I thought, and still believe, that it would bring me into some kind of communion with the people I fed. When you cook for someone, for the course of that meal you provide for them and you are responsible for them. That's a powerful, and a beautiful, thing.