Interview With How To Cook Your Life Star Edward Espe Brown

By Peter ScirettaOct. 27, 2007 1:18 pm EST

A couple weeks ago I had the chance to sit down with Zen Priest and star of How To Cook Your Life, Edward Espe Brown. Edward Brown was ordained to Zen priesthood by Suzuki Roshi, and has been practicing Zen since 1965 and Yoga since 1980. During the summer of 2006, Doris DÃ¶rrie and her crew filmed Edward Brown at his cooking classes at the Buddhist center, Scheibbs in Austria and the two Californian Buddhist centers, the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center and the Zen Center in San Francisco, where he teaches people of all generations. The film, How to Cook Your Life is a "cheerful documentary about the art of cooking and the art of cooking your life without burning it, putting too much salt or overcooking it."

You can listen to my one on one interview with Brown below. We have also included a chapter listing below so that you may skip to the next question.

0:20 When You're Cooking, You're not working on food, you're working on yourself

2:45 Is Multitasking a bad thing?

4:40 The Cycle

6:10 Isn't "Little to no waste" counterproductive to good food?

7:45 Turning Something Ordinary into Something Special

9:00 The Change in Bread

11:30 Food is Part of Our World

12:40 The Idea of a How to Cook Your Life TV Show

13:00 How Brown Became involved in the Movie

13:40 Brown's thoughts on the End Result of the Film

15:40 A Movie That Begins a Conversation

How to Cook Your Life is now playing in San Francisco, and will expand to NY, LA, Portland, Seattle, Phoenix, Santa Fe, Tucson, Denver, Sedona on November 16th, to San Diego, Minneapolis on November 23rd and Boston and DC on December 6th.