Zen Chef Edward Espe Brown, in the new documentary, How To Cook Your Life, wants his Zen students to understand our connection as humans to all things food, and has prepared and used cooking as a larder for his forty-year Zen Buddhist practice. As a founder of San Francisco’s vegetarian Greens Restaurant, and teacher at San Francisco Zen Centers (Tassajara, Green Gulch, and City Center), and meditation retreats and cooking classes at Austria’s Scheibbs Buddhist Center, Brown peels off the layers of his own humanity in the film, while venturing into the ABC’s of Buddhism for a captive audience.

“Treat food as if it were your eyesight,” Brown says to students, while trying to grip with food crises such as impenetrable packaging and what to do with leftovers in the walk-in. Filmmaker Doris Dörrie, films the movie as if she were a student herself and sequences segments by focusing the camera on ripe vegetables. A group of eggplants introduces the mind gems that Brown slices into next on his cutting board.

While Brown feeds us well in the culinary department, his wisdom might become stale to the long-term student. Reminding us to not waste food and feed ourselves may come off more like an overly concerned mother. Spending the weekend at a Buddhist retreat, statements such as, “Are you precious? Are you worth caring about?” are the springboard into meatier conversations as to how the Western world relates to food, and how we can’t feel good about ourselves if we’re using Wonder Bread to feed our souls (with a complementary shot of him pushing into the bread that has as much nutritional value as it has air).

In one poignant scene, I didn’t know whether to count my prayer beads or meditate on a teary Brown as he launches into a monologue about how the old tea pots that sit on the shelf at the center are dinged and rusty, just like his manner of being sometimes, reminding us in moments that “he’s only human.”

Nevertheless, when he explains, “When the cook is joyful, the food will taste better,” I understood, due to tasty meals prepared and eaten at my own ten-day meditation retreats. And his concept of “enjoying food in the company of family and friends and nourishing yourself and other people doesn’t finally come out of a package, it comes out of your heart,” is an important reminder to those of us in or outside the kitchen. Because as Brown puts it succinctly, as Dörrie cuts to shots of slow-moving snails and chirping birds set against spectacular mountain backdrops, “When you’re cooking, you’re also working on yourself.” And what finer a place for us to do the hard work of the heart than in the kitchen.