AI Summary
5 min readJoyful Food Documentaries With Morgan Neville
The documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville—who won an Oscar for 20 Feet from Stardom and directed Won't You Be My Neighbor?—had worked with David Chang for a decade on shows like Ugly Delicious and Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner before they ever sat down to talk about food documentaries. When they finally did, Neville pointed out that food documentaries mostly fall into two camps: the ones about why food is bad for you (Food, Inc., Super Size Me) and the ones about food as a source of joy and eccentricity. The three films he chose for this episode of Recipe Club all belong squarely to the second camp.
Garlic as Good as Ten Mothers and the Counterculture of Food
Les Blank's 1980 film Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers runs just 51 minutes but packs in an astonishing range of themes: environmentalism, class bias, authenticity, and the cultural rehabilitation of an ingredient once dismissed as low-class peasant food. The film centers on the Gilroy Garlic Festival and the legendary garlic dinners at Chez Panisse, where Alice Waters and the "Berkeley weirdo set" would gather for elaborate feasts featuring suckling pigs stuffed with rice and garlic, handmade sausages, and garlic-soaked figs.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **Ad Read: Nintendo Switch 2** - A promotional segment for the Nintendo Switch 2 system, comparing its flexible gaming options to choosing a recipe based on mood.
- 2 (00:32) **Ad Read: Paramount Plus** - A promotional segment for the crime series "MobLand" starring Tom Hardy, streaming on Paramount Plus.
- 3 (01:02) **Show Intro & Guest Introduction** - David Chang introduces the topic of food documentaries and their guest, Academy Award-winning documentarian Morgan Neville.
- 4 (01:26) **Ad Read: Olive Oils from Spain** - A promotional segment for Spanish olive oil, emphasizing its cultural and culinary heritage.
- 5 (02:04) **Setting the Table: The Joyful vs. Fear-Based Food Doc** - The group discusses the two main categories of food documentaries: those about why food is bad for you, and those about how food brings joy.
- 6 (06:42) **The Detour: A Case Study in Joyful Discovery** - The conversation pivots to Morgan and David's new CNN show, "The Detour," which embodies the spirit of unplanned, joyful travel and food discovery.
- 7 (08:32) **Film #1: "Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers"** - The group begins their deep dive into Les Blank's 1980 documentary, a 51-minute celebration of garlic and its counter-culture devotees.
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
According to today's guest, Academy Award–winning documentarian Morgan Neville, there are basically two types of food documentaries: the ones about how food is killing us, and the ones about how food brings us life. Today we're (thankfully) looking at the latter ('Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers,' 'I Like Killing Flies,' and 'El Bulli: Cooking in Progress'). David Chang hadn't seen any of them before, but now happily recommends all three. We can also recommend making Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic like Chris did for this episode.
Discover Extra Virgin Olive Oils From Spain.
Host: David Chang and Chris Ying
Producers: Noelle Cornelio, Jesse Aron, Magdalena Munao
Producer/Editor: Michael Rovzar
Production Support: Donald LoBianco, Neal Lett, Michael Delgado, Marcus Yasui, David Meyer
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