If You Have a Good Appetite for Great Food and Film . . .

On the drive to the theater to see “Julie and Julia,” I was thinking about a report I’d read earlier in the day about the rise of obesity in America—how two-thirds of us are either overweight or obese, and how on average we’re 23 pounds overweight.

That was on the drive over. During and following the film, all I wanted to do was eat.

Of course, what I longed for was not what is making us fat—not poorly produced, corn-fed, high fructose corn syrup calorie and fat-injected food, but a fine meal—the kind that feeds the soul while nourishing the body.

What I settled on was three-quarters of an exquisite piece of key lime pie at Gracie Rae’s, which did feed my soul, but not as much as the late evening ambience, the sun-streaked bay, and the gentle kiss of evening on the soft, brine-tinged breeze.

The article I had read about how we’re eating ourselves to death, argued that obesity, like tobacco and alcohol abuse, isn’t just dangerous, but expensive. New research shows medical spending averages $1,400 more a year for an obese person and the overall obesity-related health spending is around $147 billion, double what it was nearly a decade ago (according to the journal Health Affairs).

We’ve got a problem. Our approach to food. Our approach to life. The hole in the secret depths of who we are can’t be filled with food alone.

Our great national sins, the ones so deeply a part of who we are they don’t get very many sermons, don’t get marches or signs or bumper stickers, and don’t decide elections, are greed and gluttony. But the film is the antithesis of our self-destructive behavior—a celebration of good food and of women and marriage and life.

The film is about the appreciation, not the aberration and exploitation of food. The way alcohol is not an issue for people who drink moderately, food is not an issue for non gluttons.

Food, like sex or work or religion or family or alcohol, can be both cause for an used in celebration—something that leads us into transcendence—or it can be merely something we do, mundane, thoughtless, animalistic.

For both Julia and Julie, food is far, far more than just fuel.

Julia Child (Meryl Streep) and Julie Powell (Amy Adams) are featured in writer-director Nora Ephron’s adaptation of two bestselling memoirs: Powell's “Julie & Julia” and “My Life in France,” by Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme. Based on two true stories, “Julie & Julia” intertwines the lives of two women who, though separated by time and space, are both at loose ends . . . until they discover that with the right combination of passion, fearlessness and butter, anything is possible.

We live in a time and a place of plenty, which won’t last—it can’t—but what do we do while it does? Can we have the discipline to deny ourselves, the compassion to share our undeserved abundance, the wisdom and humility to be grateful, the spiritual insight to perceive what is beyond nutritional necessity? The answers are all too obvious, but we’re a young species. Maybe we’ll survive our adolescence to become who we’re meant to be.

We all have a relationship with food, and we all have to figure it out.
But food isn’t the only relationship that is explored in the film. There’s also Julie and Julia’s relationships with friends and family and society, and especially, their relationships with their husbands.

Both Julie and Julia became who they did thanks in part to the encouraging, supportive spouses in their lives. Rarely has marriage been so positively portrayed on screen. Not only does Ms. Ephron love good food, but, after a very public unhappy marriage and acrimonious divorce, she now loves being married. Both her relationship to food and her husband shine through her script and her camera and onto the screen.

“Julie and Julia” teaches ever so gently that the keys to a good life and relationship are genuine love, respect, and support given to and received from our significant others, authenticity, real purpose, fidelity to self and calling, hard work, good food, good sex—and a good appetite for all of these.

Like a consummate chef preparing a special meal for treasured friends and family, Ms. Ephron has taken the recipes found in both Julie and Julia’s books, added her own ingredients, and cooked up a near flawless film. All that’s left to say is bon appétit. Come with a good appetite to this good film about good people and good times and the good food that makes everything even better.