After watching “Julie and Julia,” the movie “based on two true stories” about two women who lived in two different time zones and periods of history, both of whom had a thing for food, Mrs. Bill Luz said she had a sudden craving for French food.

I felt exactly the same, a hunger for l’alimentation, specifically la cuisine a la francaise. What makes a movie like Julie and Julia so appetizing? All that funny talk about food, the sensuousness of the ingredients (color, texture, form, and flesh, not to mention the sounds of frying, boiling, hissing steam, live lobsters trying to crawl out of a pot)... all the married sex between the sheets in the two couples’ legitimately domesticated bedrooms... all that single-minded pursuit of joy in a dish and success in a cookbook.

The principal characters are the legendary Julia Child, who brought French cooking to a “servant-less” America and whose book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, has undergone 47 editions; and Julie Powell, a life-long fan of Ms. Child who decides that blogging 365 days of the year and cooking through Julia’s 524 recipes is the way to fulfill her life and starve boredom. Ms. Child is played by another legend, the one who has an ever-expanding vocabulary of accents, Meryl Streep, while foodie-blogger Ms. Powell is portrayed by Amy Adams.

A third major character is the cooking itself – cooking being more than an activity but an obsession, constantly a work in progress that does not end when the dish is devoured.

I know that, too, that’s why I’m not a cook. Oh, yes, I cook, but that’s not the same as saying I’m a cook! As a sometime emergency cook, I’m amazed at the proliferation of cookbooks simultaneous with an explosion of books warning how eating can kill by obesity, cholesterol, diabetes, cancer, etc.

“You’re always thinking about food!” her husband Paul used to remind Julia, but if a food lover like Ms. Child could live to the ripe old age of 91, what does that say about butter, duck, and more butter? And the man who ate her food and lived to be 92?