Garlic is as good as ten mothers

An exhaustive lip-smacking foray into the history, consumption, cultivation, culinary and curative powers of ALLIUM SATIVUM. The film lingers in the disparate kitchens of Chez Panisse and Flint’s Bar-B-Que in Berkeley, and Truckee’s Paradise for Lovers of the Stinking Rose, La Vielle Maison. There’s a piquant sto at the Gilroy Garlic Festival, pertinent asides by Werner “I’ll eat my shoe” Herzog, and a jumping soundtrack of Cajun, French Provincial, Flamenco, Swiss-Italian, Moroccan and Mexican music. The film’s loose and luscious structures also allows for such troubling trivia as the fact that Eleanor Roosevelt daily ate 3 cloves of garlic dipped in… Chocolate.Beside being all of the above more, the film is especially interesting in the way Blank, by focusing on the strange subject of Garlic, brings together people and cultures one would never expect to see in juxtaposition. It gives us insight into obsession. It is informative and entertaining and gives us food for thought about people—are people really as different as they sometimes seem?