In the film, we first meet Mary Frances as a child growing up in 1920s Whittier, California, poised between her Victorian grandmother’s strict asceticism and decadent, forbidden flavors sneaked from the family kitchen. During her high school years, she wrote copy for her father’s newspaper, The Whittier News. A beautiful, vigorous young woman, Mary Frances abandons a degree at UCLA to marry Alfred Fisher, a fellow student. The couple moves to a garrote in the epicurean paradise of Dijon, France, where Mary Frances begins to discover her literary voice and ambitions. She writes her first book Serve It Forth, published in 1937 under the gender-obscured name M.F.K, and it is so direct and sensuous that the publishers initially think the author is male.

Her troubled marriage collapses when she falls madly in love with her neighbor, the fellow writer and painter Dillwyn “Tim” Parrish, with whom she travels, writes, and collaborates. But Tim suffers from a degenerative disease, which causes him to lose first his leg and then his life to suicide in 1941. In 1942, she began working in Hollywood for Paramount Studios, working with director Billy Wilder and writing gags for stars like Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour. She becomes pregnant in 1943 and secludes herself in a boarding house in Altadena to have the baby, all the while working on the book that would become her masterful essay collection The Gastronomical Me. She goes on to marry (and divorce) again, bear a second child, and lose a beloved brother to suicide.

In the film’s final act, Fisher returns to California to stay, settling in the wine country of Napa Valley and Sonoma. It’s 1952, and a local food revolution is underway, with chefs and activist’s intent on supplanting industrialized food with a cuisine based on simple, fresh, local ingredients. Over time, Fisher takes her place as the patron saint of this new movement. This act reflects, through interviews and Fisher’s writings, on the tragedies she’s experienced and the passion she’s inspired, undiminished in the twenty years since her death.

Throughout the film Alice Waters, Ruth Reichl, Anne Lamott, Jacques Pepin, Tanya Holland, John Ash and others celebrate Fisher with insight and humor.