By Julie Lindow

It is rare that watching a film can provoke a similar response as reading an author’s work, but The Art of Eating: The Life of M.F.K. Fisher does just that. One feels both starved and satisfied. Fortunately, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher’s words on screen and paper not only awaken our hunger, but teach us how to listen to our own desires, how to slow down and pay attention, be curious, sensual, in the moment, and ultimately, how to more intensely live and love.

The film breaks open with Fisher’s own voice asking the question at the heart of her work—“Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don’t you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love the way others do? They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft. The easiest answer is to say that like most other humans, I am hungry, but there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs for food, security, and love are so mixed and mingled and intertwined, that we cannot straightly think of one without the others.” 

Fisher was not your Fannie Farmer nor Good Housekeeping recipe writer. Immediately Anne Lamott explains the man’s world that Fisher had to contend with and Ruth Reichl points out that Fisher was extraordinarily open about human needs, desire, pleasure, sex, and sexuality, far ahead of her time.

Watching the film, one feels as if one is conversing with Fisher at her dinner table. The voiceover actor Mary Dilts sounds close to Fisher’s own voice, and she reads aloud Fisher’s words in the first-person adding a layer of intimacy. Along with the voice, we are treated to family photographs and glamorous portraits of Fisher that allow us to stare at her beautiful face and look into her eyes and at those magnificent brows.

With us at this cinematic dinner table is an outstanding lineup of commentators. In addition to Lamott and Reichl, we hear from Alice Waters, Julia Child, Jacques Pepin, Fishers’ daughter Kennedy Golden, and many other chefs, historians, and fascinating figures. They share delicious morsels about how Fisher and her work influenced our cultural landscapes—literature, gastronomy, and feminism.

The commentators elucidate what so many of us have felt reading Fisher’s work and that is quite satisfying. Throughout the film, I found myself saying “yes, that is it!” We can more clearly see how at the heart of Fisher’s work is the liberating question of desire. We see how Fisher explored her own desires in her life and writing, and how she was far ahead of contemporary feminists who continually try to unravel the idea. Fisher laid bare how our desires are shaped and often crushed by so many other forces such as upbringing, patriarchy, and capitalistic industrial food systems. Women are still told in so many overt and subtle ways to set their own desires aside for others, and it can sometimes be impossible to tell the difference between those voices and our own inner voices. But Fisher’s writing shows us how to tune in to our own desires which allows one to be more whole, or as we say now, our authentic self, which in turn generally allows one to love others more honestly and fully.

The Art of Eating does more than provide us with a dinner table of talking heads, it also immerses us in Fisher’s most famous descriptions of food with images that are sweeping, emotional, and of course, sensual. The grayish-pink fuzz of a spitting kettle of strawberry jam—Fisher’s first culinary memory fills the screen and feeds our eyes. When discussing Fisher’s famous piece about heating tangerines on the radiator, the foreground of the screen is filled with gigantic tangerines. For a moment, our entire focus is on those tangerines and Fisher’s voluptuous words, her recipe for pleasure, “separate each plump, little, pregnant crescent.” And we very much want to consume all of it. Meanwhile in the background, a bit faded, as if a dream, we see the soldiers marching, the menacing mundanity of the war.

Not once did I feel the film dilly-dallied, but rather it kept a sweeping pace. This is achieved in part with historical footage and photographs that are used deliciously throughout to place Fisher’s life and work into historical context. We see old advertisements of women in idealized domestic roles. We are on the train with Fisher traveling through Europe, and we get to time travel to her homes from Whittier, California, to Dijon, France, where she lived as a young woman in the 1930s, to the sweeping views of farmland in Switzerland, and later of Fisher’s last homes and the hills of the Napa and Sonoma Valleys in California.

The words of Fisher, Alice Waters, and others, and the historical footage stirred together help us to more deeply digest how Fisher “grew up” in France where she felt more herself. We see the first French restaurant, Aux Trois Faisans, where Fisher was schooled in the religion of French food and eating which was in extreme contrast to the plain “Christian” food her mother and grandmother prepared. We see French farmers, restaurants, landscapes, and French citizens enjoying themselves in cafes. All these images of innocence and joy are then contrasted with images of WWII, German soldiers marching into Paris, and the immense hunger and loss of innocence both for Fisher and the world.

“Underneath the anguish of death and pain and ugliness, are the facts of hunger, and of unquenchable life, shining, and peaceful.” M.F.K. Fisher

If I am greedy, I would have liked more reflection about how Fisher’s work fits within literary history. But one can only cover so much with a budget and within the constraints of an hour and half. Fisher was born into a family with five generations of newspaper publishers, editors, and journalists and started to write for her family’s paper at a young age. We learn that the first book Fisher read on her own was the Wizard of Oz, which is about a rather adventurous young lady. She also came of age when surrealism and stream of consciousness writing were becoming popular, namely Andre Breton’s circle of surrealists in Paris, and Virginia Woolf and James Joyce who were some of the first English-language authors to write their characters’ sensuous stream of consciousness about everyday events such as buying flowers or sitting in a bath tub. I wonder if Fisher read them, and if she read Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex? I imagine she did. One can see how her writing style was born of both journalism and literature, and how it is the forerunner to what is currently so popular, creative non-fiction or literary essays. She writes across disciplines using sociology, anthropology, gastronomy, psychology, memoir, journalism, food writing….and it is with these unique recipes of literary subjects and styles that she is able to make the everyday magical.

The very last image we see is Fisher—she is throwing her head back in a laugh and breaking the most irrepressible smile. We are left feeling sharply her joy of writing, eating, loving, living, and that she is gone—the taste is tearfully bittersweet.

In the end, The Art of Eating: The Life of M.F.K Fisher succeeds in making the audience feel grateful for her thirty books and hungry for more. As she wrote, “There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine is drunk.” So, after watching the show, enjoy a delicious meal with friends of food fresh from a farm, and wine, and converse about the film, our love of Fisher, and how we too can live and love more fully.

Julie Lindow is a writer and editor living in San Francisco, California, and Athens, Greece. She is a regular contributor to Eat Drink Films and editor of the book, Left in the Dark: Portraits of San Francisco Movie Theatres. When she is not writing and editing, she can be found watching old noir films, walking foggy hills, cooking, and conversing with friends over long meals. You can find her at www.julielindow.com