Movie Review: Recipes for Disaster
An Anglo-Finnish Family Tries to Live Without Oil for a Year
In Recipes for Disaster, a “typical Anglo-Finnish” household decides to go on a year-long “oil diet.” The instigator of this low-octane regimen is John Webster, an Englishman who’s married a Finnish woman with whom he has two small sons. Un-enthused about the “diet” in the first place, his wife, Anu, is even less happy about his decision to put the experiment on film. Luckily for the audience, he overcomes her objections, as this is a delightful film, both entertaining and educational.
The Oil Diet: The First Steps
The initial steps the Websters take are relatively non-onerous: use public transit instead of the car; use the train instead of airplanes; get heat and light from environmentally-friendly electricity providers instead of from fossil fuels; keep the plastic items they already own but buy no new ones. At first, although Anu complains about the long bus rides required to take the children to school, these changes aren’t a huge imposition. But it’s that last item – plastics – that becomes a problem.
As Webster points out, plastic, much like sugar and corn, is in everything. It’s nearly impossible to live a normal life, in the Western sense of the word, without consuming plastic. So John shaves without lotion. Anu uses eyeliner inherited from her mother. They brush their teeth with homemade toothpaste and wash their hair with homemade shampoo. Only through a friend of Anu’s, who has access to unwrapped commercial rolls, do they acquire toilet paper.
The Oil Diet Becomes “Anorexia”
Midway through the year, John becomes increasingly obsessed with decreasing his family’s carbon footprint. He buys a new car that can run on vegetable fuel, and decides that the family needs to rid itself of all the plastic items in the home that are not regularly used.
It’s at this point that you realize he has become slightly unhinged: there is no excuse for sending perfectly good items to landfills simply because they’re made of plastic. Not long afterwards, he informs his wife that he is going to start selling bio-fuel. At this, Anu loses her temper for real, saying she feels she has no voice in what the family does anymore.
Recipes for Disaster: Ingredients that Work and Ones that Don’t
The film suffers a bit from John’s overly-earnest tone: his voice-overs, in particular, sound over-dramatic and amateurish. But he and his family are incredibly appealing. The boys, in particular, are adorable, and the moment, early on, when the younger one challenges his father over the fact that his video camera is made of plastic, is when the audience falls in love with the whole family.
It’s also to John’s credit that he shows how unhappy Anu is much of the time, and to her credit that she does not come off as a carping naysayer but as a frustrated woman, in love with her husband, but with perfectly valid points about the impact he is having on her life.
Finally, the film is full of useful facts, including the size of the carbon footprints of various people around the world. (Surprise, surprise, North Americans are the worst offenders.) The film was chosen as the January 2009 Doc Soup selection in Toronto, and Webster was invited to come to Toronto to present it, but he declined, based on the enormous fossil fuel consumption required to fly from Finland to Canada. Although the year is up, the Websters are trying to maintain their diet, and doing so, are making a small dent in the oil gluttony that consumes the world.
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