By Jeff Game
Continuing my love of travel movies, here is my take on one my favorite films of 2014, Chef: The Travel Movie.
There are many ways in life to discover who we are and where we stand in this world and two of the best ways are through food and through travel. Cultures and societies all over the world are built on the different foods they create and eat every day.
As well, when you travel anywhere, whether across your own country or across the globe, you can really get a sense of how a world outside your own exists, let alone you can really discover the real person inside of yourself.
In fact, this is the story in new movie Chef by writer, director and star Jon Favreau is trying to tell us, that we discover ourselves through the food we eat, the cultures we explore through food and experience we gain through travel.
Favreau does a great job weaving a story of a chef who has really hit the wall creatively and is struggling to find new direction in his life. The chef finally let’s everything go in his own life and discovers way more open roads, traveling his way and cooking his way back to Los Angeles and an even better life than he could have imagined.
The movie Chef is a really great example of how traveling around just our own country and discovering the vast difference of food culture options we have is truly amazing and also speaks to how diverse we are as a society. We really define who we are as nation through a Cuban sandwich in Miami, light and fluffy beignets in New Orleans and BBQ brisket in Texas.
Traveling anywhere, either down the street or to another continent can change any person, if you allow yourself to immerse yourself in the culture around you and one of the grandest ways we do this as humans, we eat and love great food.
Jon Favreau is not only bringing back original story filmmaking with Chef –the writer/director/star is showing us that when we really take a journey through life and the world, we can all come out the other side better humans and essentially that is what we are all striving to become.
Go see Chef, it will make you want to travel and eat some great food — whether that be a new place you discover or geographically around the globe.