A product developer’s role is to create food with great ingredients, imaginatively prepared and beautifully presented. Their food can be transformative.
Babette’s Feast is a 1987 Danish film (Big gasp! Yes it is in Danish with English subtitles), with a lot of gray (not “Fifty shades of Grey”, this is gray in colour, gray sky, gray clothes, gray hair…you get the gist). How am I doing ? Am I selling it to you so far ?
The film has absolutely mouthwatering scenes of food preparation, presentation and consumption and won an Oscar for best foreign language film and a BAFTA amongst other. How am I doing now?
Babette, a very capable chef (we do not know this at the start of the film) turns up in a remote village in Denmark. The villagers are all of a certain age and lead a poor and restrictive life, where food is seen only as fuel. Babette then comes into money and choses to create a luxurious feast for the villagers. She brings in ingredients they have never seen before and wines fit for a king. She works tirelessly to create the most incredible dishes, she was after all the head chef at the renown Cafe Anglais in Paris before she moved to the village. She lays the table with the whitest of white tablecloths, the finest crockery and cutlery and crystal glasses.
The scene is now set for magic to happen. How else would you explain the transformation of this gathering of austere, quiet, set in their ways people to a smiling, talkative (well a bit more than before) and evidently happy group.
And this is what fabulous food, created with great ingredients, prepared and cooked with imagination, presented with care and enjoyed without rushing can do. It can transform a gathering and unlock conversations.
Our mission as product developers is to allow magic to take place. Start with great ingredients, bring your passion and your imagination into the recipes and package your creation in a way that will do it justice.
Will we achieve it every single time ? Maybe not, but we are surely going to give it our best shot. A very good friend of mine and one I consider to be a product development guru, would create recipe after recipe until he was satisfied he was ready to show you his product.
Our mission as product developers is to allow magic to take place. Start with great ingredients, bring your passion and your imagination into the recipes and package your creation in a way that will do it justice.
More details on storyline and the film: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092603/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babette%27s_Feast
The film was based on a book by Karen Blixen (pen name Isak Dinesen).
#BabettesFeast #BestFoodFilms #FoodForTheSoul
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