Julie and Julia

The movie Julie and Julia follows the lives of two characters, Julie and Julia Child, and highlights the parallels in their lives and their journey of finding their passion for food. Although Julie and Julia have never met and were living in different countries in different time periods, their lives are eerily similar in that food has changed both of their lives for the better. When Julia Child was living in France with her husband in the 1940s, she was fascinated with French cuisine and started to take a cooking class. While in the class, she realized that cooking was actually something that she was passionate about, and she had the idea of writing a cookbook that taught French cooking to American housewives. The cookbook became a huge success, and 50 years later it ends up in the household of the movie's other main character, Julie. Julie used cooking as an escape from the stress of her boring and demanding job. One day, her husband gave her the idea of starting a blog, and she decided to make her blog about food. She gave herself a year to cook every recipe from Julia Child's cookbook, and she would describe every detail of her journey on her blog. What started out as a hobby soon began to take over Julie's life, and her obsession with cooking even caused a strain in her marriage. It all became worth it, however, since her blog became popular and it even got featured on the New York times. Both of these women taught us that when you don't know what direction your life is going in, following your passions and staying dedicated to your goals no matter what hardships you will face will take you far. 

Can a chef be an artist?

Though many people don't realize it, cooking is a form of art that has been overlooked and unrecognized. Cooking is a skill that is hard enough to master, but it takes a special kind of chef to transform their food into a type of edible art.  I've watched numerous episodes of Cake Boss, and the way the chefs sculpture their cakes seems to be similar to the procedures used in architecture, and watching them decorate the frosting is almost like watching a painter hard at work. It is also interesting when the chef presents the food in a creative way on your plate. The most talented chefs know that the arrangement of food can somehow affect its taste, since the better the food looks the more appealing it is. Beyond the looks and presentation of the food, the act of cooking itself can even be considered art. Everyone can cook to a certain extent, but not everyone can cook well. There is a sort of precision to cooking, where you need to heat food in the oven for an exact amount of time or add just the right amount of seasoning to get the flavor you want. You need to have enough knowledge of ingredients so that you can know what to use as a substitute when you're out of a certain ingredient, or make a savory concoction out of foods that don't even seem compatible with each other. Anyone can cook using a recipe, but only a true artist can experiment with whatever ingredient they please, create their work of art, and perfect it with enough detail until it becomes a masterpiece.

Babette's Feast

Babette's Feast is a story of religion and the difficulty to give in to the temptations that drive your everyday life. Throughout the story, the two main characters, sisters Martine and Phillipa, are living a life based on their extremely strict Puritan values imposed on them by their father. They believe that giving up things that are pleasurable would benefit them in the afterlife, and their suffering would be rewarded. They dressed in plain clothes everyday, and they even denied their feelings for the men that tried to seduce them. But there was only one thing that was able to cause the girls to temporarily forget their religion and experience pleasure: food. 

When Babette decided to prepare a feast for the congregation, everyone was reluctant to eat the food for fear of being glutenous. To be polite, they agreed that they would eat the food, but not discuss any part of the meal so they don't display any form of excitement. When General Lorens Lowenhielm showed up to the feast, however, he did not know of these plans. As a non-Puritan, he had no hesitations about openly discussing the meal. Though they never admitted it out loud, General Lowenhielm's praises of the food were a reflection of what everyone was feeling, and for a moment the mood was lightened. For the first time in their lives, the girls and the rest of the congregation saw food as a beautiful delicacy rather than just something you needed to survive. Food is a very powerful tool, and a good meal causes people to come together and experience joy and excitement in almost any situation.