Michelin stars turn chefs into obsessives, and food writer William Sitwell spends the run-up to the 2010 Michelin Guide finding out why. He talks to Raymond Blanc and Marco Pierre White about what the rating actually means, then works a full day in Marcus Wareing's kitchen at the Berkeley, watching the exact placement of a sliced chestnut on Dorset crab and the plating of a fish and chip soup pre-starter, food built for judges who might be sitting at any table. In Paris he meets Michelin's leadership at their headquarters and interviews a senior British inspector filmed in shadow, who compares the job to being a secret agent, 'licensed to eat.' The film's darkest turn comes through the widow of a three-star chef who took his own life under the pressure of keeping his rating, a reminder that the stakes are not just reputational. Sitwell keeps asking the plain question underneath the ceremony: does any of this actually make the food better, or just harder to make.