Food in Film: What Makes a Meal Appetizing to the Audience?
I am a foodie in the weirdest way--I am a super picky eater. I have been a vegetarian for most of my life, have a “thing” about texture, and would prefer a cheese quesadilla to a five course farm-to-table super fancy meal. But I love food. I love reading about food. I love watching cooking shows and food competition shows and learning about everything from molecular gastronomy to food styling in photography.
What I appreciate about food is that it connects science and art. When I had a particularly rough class of students a few years back, I took up baking as a hobby. Despite being an “English and social studies” kid, there was something comforting about the science of baking. If you follow a recipe, you will get the result that you want. This is something that DOES NOT happen in teaching all the time. It was relaxing and truly satisfying to be able to have a little bit of control over something when, professionally, control wasn’t happening every day. I continue to practice improving on my baking, and it has brought me more joy and opportunities than I would have ever imagined. It’s part of the magic of food and cooking.
To me, food is the great connector in life. We all have to eat multiple times a day. We all have memories connected to food. Everyone has their favorite snacks and snacks they hate. A lot of us have complicated relationships with food. And of course, cooking and food is a way of showing your love to family and friends. It’s no surprise that filmmakers try to capture the wonder of food in their films.
There are so many different ways to incorporate food memorably into a movie. Sometimes, food can be used as a way to bring family members together in a scene. Everyone needs to eat dinner, right? It can also be the cause of a conflict. I have seen more than one cafeteria food fight in a teen movie. To me, though, there are some special movies that take food from “Oh, that looks good” to something more. These are the films that understand that food can be the vessel to a deeper understanding of something. It can be about closeness, but can also symbolize loneliness, or healing. It can cause tears, both happy and sad. Before I go into the three most spectacular foods in film, here are a few other examples of ways that food can be a super memorable part of a movie:
Goodfellas (1990): The restaurant scene will always be iconic, but I also love the spaghetti making in jail. Cutting garlic with a razor blade!!!
A Goofy Movie (1995): This sounds super silly, but the pizza in this movie will be burned into my memory. NO PIZZA HAS EVER LOOKED THIS AMAZING.
When Harry Met Sally (1989): Picky eaters rejoice! I felt very seen watching Sally order literally anything at a diner. As the queen of “but can you…” as I place my order, I understand Sally’s need to have her pie just as she likes it.
Finally, here are my top three food scenes in a movie. It’s kind of funny, each of these scenes is really short, only a minute or two long. I guess it just goes to show that it doesn’t take much to make a lasting memory, especially when it comes to food.
3. The Ratatouille - Ratatouille (2007)
This movie rocks. It is one of my favorite Pixar films, and it does not get the credit that it deserves. Ratatouille is about a rat (ha!) named Remy who wants to be a chef in Paris. He achieves his dream by working with a young man who is just starting out at a restaurant as a garbage boy. Pixar movies are known for their heart, and this one brings out every emotion through--you guessed it--cooking and food. The most poignant scene in the film comes near the end. A notoriously tough restaurant critic named Ego is visiting Remy’s restaurant, and Remy decides to make ratatouille for him. While others balk at his decision to make this extremely simple vegan peasant dish (YASS Remy, my plant-based king), Ego takes one bite and is transported back to his childhood where his mother makes him the same dish. The critic in Ego is gone, while the food lover remains.
2. One Beautiful Cupcake - Bridesmaids (2011)
Bridesmaids is such a great movie. Annie’s best friend Lillian gets engaged while Annie’s life is falling apart. She is asked to be the maid of honor, which begins a series of mishaps and misfortunes. Bridesmaids isn’t a movie about food. If anything, Bridesmaids makes you not really want to eat anything at all (Hello wedding dress boutique scene!). However, I’d argue that this comedy has one of the saddest and most relatable food scenes I have ever watched. Annie is living with the ghost of her failed bakery business, one of multiple failures that she feels she is experiencing in her life. During one scene, Annie decides to bake again. She seemingly takes hours to make one, singular, perfect cupcake. After she cleans up, she looks at the cupcake on the counter, picks it up, and takes a huge bite out of it. One a literal level, bakers understand what she is going through here. We have all baked things, not really having a reason. We have put hours into making a beautiful cake or batch of cookies, only to have the sugar bomb sit there, looking back at you like, “Well, now what?” But this scene goes beyond that. For us viewers, it represents the idea that you can put your whole heart into something, can be really really good at something, and it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t always work out as you planned. And sometimes, that fondant flower-ed cupcake can be a symbol or loneliness, failure, and unhappiness. Food doesn’t always make you think of happiness and togetherness, as Bridesmaids shows in this perfect scene.
1. The Grilled Cheese Sandwich - Chef (2014)
Chef is a quiet movie about a chef who leaves his job at a fancy restaurant and opens a food truck with his son. The scene where he makes a grilled cheese sandwich for his son is easily the number one craveable food in film for me. Sure, the grilled cheese is one of my favorite meals (especially when paired with the classic tomato soup) but even if it wasn’t, Jon Favreau created one minute of savory, mouth watering perfection with this scene. It takes something really simple--making lunch for a loved one--and turns it into something much more. The simple ingredients are much larger than their parts. Taking two pieces of store-bought bread, a few slices of different cheeses, a squirt of oil, and a little too much butter, Chef Carl shows what a little love can do to make even the easiest meal an amazing one. I think what gets me is the little details. The soft music playing in the background, mimicking what it’s really like when you are focused on cooking something well. Carl maneuvering to check out the sandwich from all angles, carefully adding extra butter so that the bread will be as golden brown as possible. And of course, his son taking the first bite, the satisfying cheese pull that seems a mile long. I saw this film when it was first released, and I just adore it for its sweetness and simplicity. It’s a lovely story about food and family with which I think most people can make a connection. Somehow though, that grilled cheese scene is what sticks out in my head. That quick, seemingly unimportant minute. Sort of like memories in all our lives, right?