Christina Cann

How cliché, right? I know the movie just came out and according to the paperback cover it is a “national bestseller,” but…whatever. I love reading books about food. I read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle earlier this summer and I am not exaggerating when I say that it really changed my life. I am more conscious about the food I eat, I try to only eat food raised or grown close to my home, I had a good-sized outdoor garden this summer and my husband and I are going to try an indoor vegetable garden this winter. (Not sure how successful we’ll be, but hey! Worth a shot!)

In August, I took a trip to the Finger Lakes and stopped by the Women’s Rights National Historic Park in Seneca Falls. I had just finished reading AVM and the book A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove: A History of American Women Told Through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances caught my eye. I splurged on it and it was a fascinating read.

So, to continue the parade of food-related books this year, I am now embarking on Julie and Julia. I really like it. A lot of people have said that the character of Julie in the book is unsympathetic, annoying, etc. (Seriously, google “Julie Powell annoying” and you’ll get almost 13,000 results.) But I think she’s brash and unapologetic, two qualities I really admire. You don’t like her blog? I doubt she really cares. She’s doing it for the love of the thing, for the feeling she gets when she connects with Julia Child’s recipes.

She’s also hilarious and really messed up. I just read the scene in the book (spoiler alert! I guess!) where she’s pretending to be the killer from Silence of the Lambs with the pig skin. Let me tell you about the first time I watched Silence of the Lambs: I was about 14 years old, babysitting for three kids, the oldest of whom was maybe ten. After putting the two younger kids to bed, my charge suggested that we watch Silence of the Lambs because her parents said it was a really good movie. I didn’t know anything about it and it had been taped from television (remember when people did that?), so I couldn’t consult the tape cover for guidance. I didn’t even have an MPAA rating to go off of. (This was before the ubiquity of the Internet, when I could have typed “Silence of the Lambs” into imdb and known within five seconds that this was not a movie I should allow my ten-year-old babysitting charge to watch.)

So I agreed. And then she and I spent the rest of the night curled up on the couch under a ratty afghan, too terrified to move or speak. Somehow, I couldn’t turn it off. But I should never have turned it on in the first place.

Wow, how did I get to Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins? Anyway, all this is a longwinded way of saying: I like Julie and Julia, the book. When it hits the cheap theatres or Netflix, I’ll probably see and like Julie and Julia, the movie. Fin.