People say that film is a universal artform, and while cinema can do much to communicate across cultural and religious lines, it still can’t compete with food. Moviegoers who find Japanese anime too weird and violent will sit down to a sushi lunch perhaps chased by some cold sake, and diners who quail at the prospect of an Arabic-language film will happily order hummus and döner kebab. Thus movies have depended in large part on food for decades.
Before color film became a regular feature of our moviegoing, black-and-white films couldn’t present much that was truly appetizing. Nevertheless, their stories still used food as a key to revealing story or character — in the 1934 Oscar winner It Happened One Night, Claudette Colbert’s spoiled heiress sees how ordinary Americans live during the Great Depression and is amazed to find that they eat carrots raw. A few minutes later, she’s munching on one herself while waiting for a car to pick her up. A decade and a half later, Vittorio de Sica’s classic The Bicycle Thieves portrayed the poverty of post-World War II Italy in stark terms when the main character takes his son to a pizzeria and can only afford to buy them bread, while the boy sees a well-dressed fat kid at the next table stuffing his face with mozzarella.
The golden age of food movies began in the 1980s, when film started to use the big screen to showcase the glories of national cuisine. At a time when instant ramen was being introduced to American supermarkets, Juzo Itami’s Tampopo paid tribute to the glories of fresh-made noodles and soup made from scratch. Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet glimpsed the amount of uneaten food at the titular ceremony as a way of commenting on a Taiwanese society caught between old traditions and new habits, while his Eat Drink Man Woman used the medium of film to put us in the same position as its aged chef, who could no longer taste his own food. We could see and hear the sizzle of his Coke-glazed chicken wings and ganwei stone-roasted chicken but were powerless to taste them. (Incidentally, the 2001 remake Tortilla Soup may not be as subtle a piece of drama, but it’s every bit as good with Mexican food as Lee’s is with southern Chinese.) I saw 1996’s Big Night in a theater in New York, and I still recall gasping in my seat along with other audience members when Stanley Tucci and Tony Shalhoub unveiled that timpano to their dinner guests for an Italian celebration.
Since then, filmmakers have continued using food as a way of hooking audiences and/or indulging their own love of food. Wes Anderson’s food obsessions could take up an entire article on their own, while Pixar’s Ratatouille gained the appreciation of even the discerning palates in France. (The French nevertheless pointed out that Rémy served confit byaldi to Anton Ego rather than ratatouille.) Where The Taste of Things paid homage to classic French cooking methods, The Hundred-Foot Journey emphasized the necessity of evolution through the story of an Indian family setting up a restaurant in France.
Here in America, Jon Favreau’s Chef pulled in audiences with its depiction of its main character’s Latin fusion cuisine. If you can find the Indian remake (also called Chef), you’ll see its protagonist take similar inspiration from other parts of India as well as America as he makes Kerala fish curry and Delhi chhole bhatture, replacing Favreau’s Cuban sandwiches with pizza toppings wrapped in a roti.
These days, more film cultures around the world are referring to their food cultures. The Georgian film And Then We Danced drew controversy for its gay subject matter, but I was more compelled by the khinkali and khachapuri that the main character serves in his day job as a restaurant waiter. The Cakemaker is a gay romance about a German man who travels to Israel to mourn his deceased boyfriend, and it’s also about a pastry chef who learns to make shakshuka alongside his Black Forest cake. In the Ivorian film Night of the Kings, the prison inmates temporarily take over their prison and feast on jollof rice during a night of storytelling that might end in bloodshed. The Oscar-winning KPop Demon Hunters features a wide variety of Korean food, though the filmmakers pointedly excluded kimchi because global audiences already associate the fermented cabbage with Korean cooking. As filmmaking opens up to more corners of the world, we’re able to see and learn about more food in its native environment.
