As part of its wide-ranging, multifaceted series Food Matters, UC Santa Barbara’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Center (IHC) is screening two films (curated by The Indy‘s own D.J. Palladino) during the next couple weeks, each examining if we are what and how we eat. On Monday, November 24, at 7:30 p.m. in the MultiCultural Center Theater, there’s a free screening of What’s Cooking? a multigenerational, multiethnic look at Thanksgiving in L.A.’s Fairfax District directed by Gurinder Chadha (Bhaji on the Beach). The cast alone is tasty enough: Alfre Woodard, Dennis Haysbert, Lainie Kazan, Joan Chen, Juliana Margulies, Kyra Sedgwick-as Roger Ebert put it, “There are so many characters, so vividly drawn, with such humor and life, that a synopsis is impossible.” Then, on Wednesday, December 3, at 7:30 pm at UCSB’s Campbell Hall, the IHC and Arts & Lectures will co-present the powerful, insightful Our Daily Bread (Nikolaus Geyrhalter, 2005). Examining our world of high-tech, big-business food, this hypnotic doc is “an unblinking, often disturbing look at industrial food production from field to factory. : Our Daily Bread can be extremely difficult to watch, but the film’s formal elegance, moral underpinning, and intellectually stimulating point of view also make it essential.” At least that’s what Manohla Dargis wrote in the New York Times.
