Talk about the wrong audience. Doris Dörrie’s “How to Cook Your Life,” which makes its New York premiere today at the IFC Center, wants us to realize and reconnect with what we consume, as well as the ways in which our relationship with food parallels our relationship with our own bodies, with those around us, and with the universe. Yet by coming to a theater in Manhattan — probably the world’s island least in need of groceries — it’s a movie that also challenges the accepted New York way of life.

Then again, maybe that makes the whole thing a more comfortable sell for New Yorkers. Living in a world so detached from how most fellow humans acquire and eat their food almost makes it easier to realize what’s lacking, to recognize how our lifestyle is dependent on just-in-time deliveries, takeout menus, and semi-hourly trash removal.

Regardless, by the documentary’s final third, as conversation moves away from ingredients and the cooking process to such loftier ideas as the ways in which food connects to the land and to our spiritual sense of self, Ms. Dorrie won over this critic, who finds it difficult to recall the last meal he cooked himself.

To describe this film as a profile of the Zen chef Edward Espe Brown implies that “How To Cook Your Life” is some sort of self-help recipe card for a happy life. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. It instead examines the need for perspective and scrutiny, and promotes a more active state of awareness.

The film begins with Mr. Brown expressing a state of dismay: “What’s happened in our culture?” he asks, recalling his childhood, perplexed by the processed, pre-fabricated loaves of bread that he saw people eating. “Why are we eating like this? What went wrong? We’re eating a puffy kind of chemically, not very tasty, papery-cardboard bread. We don’t do things anymore because supposedly machines can do it better. When we give away our capacity to do things with our hands, with our bodies, to use our hands to knead the bread, to make things, to touch things, to smell things, how are we going to feel alive?”

The film seems created expressly to challenge our reality of processed food and robotic eaters. The author of the “Tassajara Bread Book,” which the movie describes as the “bible of bread making,” Mr. Brown has long taught cooking classes in northern California that mix the philosophy of meditation with the practical basics of food preparation. We see him in the kitchen, kneading the bread, as confused spectators look on, failing in their attempts to work with their food as fluidly and fashionably as the master. We watch Mr. Brown give lectures, relating the calm required of chefs to the calm often required in everyday life, and comparing less-than-ideal ingredients to the bad luck that can befall us at any time.

One of Mr. Brown’s central lessons involves teaching students to be alive and awake in the present. And as we watch Mr. Brown demonstrate in the kitchen, one can see the way the lesson relates to cooking, the way each touch of the dough or each slice of the knife has its own impact on the food being prepared. As Ms. Dörrie’s cameras observe Mr. Brown, first from the seat of a cooking-class student and later from the lecture hall and the chef’s residence, we notice the ways in which even the master falls short of his own standards. More than once, Mr. Brown becomes frustrated with his food, and his impatience boils over into anger. He frequently admits to students that they must accept — not choose to ignore — their own flaws.

In its discussion of some of the same themes examined in the recent environmental documentary “The Real Dirt on Farmer John,” which was less concerned with spiritual harmony than the dangers inherent in an increasing reliance on corporate farming, “How To Cook Your Life” is most effective when it ties the way we cook to the way we live. In one memorable scene, the Zen master links our culture’s casually ambivalent mentality about food to the way we consume media, value human interaction, and even judge our own success. “We’ll pay a lot of money not to cook,” Mr. Brown says, explaining how he once thought he was a failure because he couldn’t get his biscuits to taste like the prepackaged Pillsbury biscuits he knew as a child. “It’s not just biscuits, of course, it’s our lives. We start trying to make our lives look like Cosmopolitan magazine or something. The sitcoms on television, who are these people? Why would you want to be like them?”

ssnyder@nysun.com