One piece of advice this weekend: Don't go to see "Julie & Julia" hungry. Between the chocolaty pastries and the glistening roast duck and the butter slathered generously on everything, your stomach will be growling far before the credits roll on this hybrid biopic about a legendary television chef and the contemporary blogger who decided to cook every single one of her recipes.

Apparently, life on the New York set of the film brought with it another set of culinary dangers. As star Meryl Streep explained to MTV News, most everyone ended up packing on a few pounds during the shoot.

"The food was unbelievable, and the crew was consequently the happiest group of men and women in New York City at the time," Streep said while promoting the film at a farm and restaurant north of the city.

When either she or co-star Amy Adams had to prepare a duck or a chocolate cake onscreen, Streep explained, "They have 21 of the other ones in case something happens to that one — the cutting is sloppy or something. So all of that would be brought out at the wrap, and nobody went home.

"It's almost the reason to take the job," she laughed about her own decision to portray Julia Child, whose cookbooks have made sophisticated French techniques accessible to Americans for generations.

Adams plays a real-life blogger named Julie Powell, a bored worker bee who decided to cook every one of the recipes in Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" in a year and blog about the process. The blog became a book, which writer/director Nora Ephron then paired with Child's story for "Julie & Julia."

While Streep did her best not to pack on some "J&J"-induced pounds, Adams arrived on set with her own culinary dedication. "I'll go for hours with the chips and salsa, and my friends are like, 'Amy, are you really going to finish that enormous plate of nachos?' " she told MTV News. "And I will commit. It'll be, like, an hour and a half, two hours."

But she was quick to caution us all about one thing: "You have to pace yourself with the margaritas. But that's just good advice in life."

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