Julia Child As Patron Saint? Not Exactly

There's no doubt that the book "Julie/Julia" (soon to be a major movie) is mostly hilarious. Based on the bloggings about the author's year of cooking all of the recipes of Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," the author mixes her personal life, her cooking disasters and her job as a lowly secretary for the Homeland Security department in the wake of the World Trade Center collapses with great aplomb.

In fact, she is as brave in her writing as she was in her cooking, despite some harrowing days.

The only failing that the book has is its dubious view of faith, God and especially Christianity. Perhaps because Julie Powell was raised in Texas, where there's no ignoring the Bible Belt sensibility, she felt more of a need to diss traditional religion as a nonbeliever. Or perhaps it's because to most people in Generation X, religion is an embarrassment, if not downright irrelevant to them at their young ages. Given that, it's still a harsh take on Christians to write about them as though they are mentally deficient, pathetic or both.

When her girlfriends ask for advice about sleeping with married men or are about to embark on an affair, she has no courage to speak up and tell them that it's wrong. As much as she seems to love her own husband and her life with him, somehow these moral failings apparently don't bother her much.

We are who we choose to spend time with as much as we are what we do. In that sense, Julie did a great job in being like Julia Child, but a poor job as a friend and as someone who takes life seriously.

All of those silly rules in the Bible were created for a reason -- just like Julia Child put down each painstaking step for a reason in her impossibly complicated recipes. They lead to a life that is worth living and which improves the lives of those around us. The rules cannot be skipped for a book or a cookbook. Eventually ignoring the basics, like, oh, say, the Ten Commandments, leads to real disaster, not the drama queen wailing-on-the-floor-with-a-ruined-Cuisinart kind.