Food Documentaries

The Botany of Desire

Now a PBS piece done as a companion to Pollen’s book. On the surface, Pollen’s work is about helping humans realize they are not managing the natural world with the control they believe they have. In reality Pollen’s work is another way of making the natural world seem more manageable. It casts simple characters like potatos and apples as sweetly manipuatlive friends, who coax us into a hidden and happy partnership. I suspect this is the over-simplification of science that so angers almost everyone I know, but there’s something I like about it. First, it’s all about narrating the natural world, which is (finally!) my own interest--not the nature, but the narrative. Second, it recognizes animal activities like the import and export of agriculture as “natural,” which it is, in a culture that often see species transplantation as an unnatural crime committed by humans alone (no one here is defending cane toads, but certainly many of our mistakes are often very natural indicators of how commonly species break the balance of their ecosystem). Finally, even when I find some of Pollen’s analysis a bit dumbly uninteresting, I also find it sweet to see grown adults doing what children do: telling stories that are only a fraction of the apparent truth in an attempt to more easily live in the world.

I Like Killing Flies

I Like Killing Flies was recommended to me by a family member who loves both documentaries and oddball behavior. This movie must have been an easy win. It follows the move of Shopsin’s, a diner/grocery in New York from its long standing location in Greenwich Village to a new space in the Essex Street Market. The diner is notable for two reasons: its wholly unusual fare and its erratic chef and owner, Kenny Shopsin. Shopsin barks his way through the documentary, berating customers and family alike while pausing to debate at length his many personal philosophies with the filmmaker. Shopsin is amusing and contradictory, but after a while he seems hardly worth the film stock. For a personality project, Shopsin strikes me as another egomaniac, encouraged far past what might be amusing by a community a little too eager to boast of local color. The documentary was fun to watch, but it sadly neglected the real star of Shopsin’s: the food. The cooks at this diner have developed a 6-page menu almost as crowded as the kitchen—around 900 recipes total. The recipes are bizarre and funny and look delicious. I suppose the fascination with Shopsin stems from the public’s amazement that such beautiful and unlikely dishes come from so course a cook, but that narrative seems far less interesting than the story of the food itself. So, I’ll close this post by saying if I were in New York right now and in a group of fewer than 5 people I’d be ordering an avocado cheese tortilla soup, or a tofu pea peanut rice, or some lemon ricotta pancakes, or possible one of the brunch combination platters, either C, F, or N.