Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin is famous for the statement, “Tell me what you eat and I’ll tell you who you are.” It appears in The Physiology of Taste (1825), a book in which cooking becomes a subject of philosophical and sociological reflection, an artform and a science. No one has ever taken their food quite so seriously or done so much to change the perception of the everyday act of eating.

Brillat-Savarin was the model for Marcel Rouff’s novel La vie et la passion de Dodin-Bouffant, Gourmet (1924), translated as The Passionate Epicure. That book is the basis of The Taste of Things, by French-Vietnamese director Anh Hung Tran, a film that has been described as “food porn” because of the amount of time we spend in the kitchen watching dishes being prepared. If we’re not in the kitchen we’re at the dining table, as these gourmet creations are unveiled and consumed. The movie begins with a kitchen sequence that lasts for more than half an hour, with only the most perfunctory dialogue. It’s utterly absorbing.