Gurinder Chadha

Having spent the weekend filling my freezer with late summer goodness from my local farmer's market and finding out about Lisa Jervis’s new book Cook Food: A Manualfesto for Easy, Healthy, Local Eating, the Grrrl on Film has nourishment on her mind.

And I’m not the only one, the recent release of Nora Ephron's Julie & Julia has placed Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking back on best seller lists. And last weekend marked the kickoff of Canning Across America – an event organized by a nationwide ad hoc collective of cooks, gardeners and food lovers committed to promoting safe food preservation and the joys of community building through food with how-to classes, demos and home canning parties in cities around the country.

As a result, I’ve been thinking about women and food in film and have come up with a short list of women preparing and/or enjoying food on screen. Some of these I’ve seen, and some I haven’t, but here’s a delicious sampling to whet your appetites!

Sarah Mirk’s post last month, Beat the Majority - Name a Female Scientist, reminded me of an ad I saw several years ago for a Women in Film festival here in Seattle. In it, a dominatrix flanked by muscle men is asking a man in an interrogation chair if he can name five female directors – five female directors who weren’t actresses first. Of course, he can’t, and the dominatrix proceeds to list all the directors included in that year’s festival line-up. While many accomplished actresses have also directed – Barbara Streisand, Jodie Foster, Ida Lupino, Sofia Coppola, Penny Marshall, and Diane Keaton – to name but a few; it could be argued that it was their acting that helped them break into directing. This should in no way belittle any of their accomplishments, but what about women who set out to direct in the first place, without the benefit of already being recognized?