Reel Food & World Cinema

As demonstrated in this film, the role of food is not only to reflect on the culture and ethnical backgrounds of those preparing it (i.e. Tita and her family), but also allows one to showcase their own personal identity into the food that they are making. In the film Like Water for Chocolate , the foods themselves have several cultural and national identities, both in the final food product and the ingredients that go into it. Most of the foods cooked in this film have "imported" ingredients, that is to say ingredients that come from other countries to add extra flavor and perhaps even enhance the quality of the food. For example, one of the foods mentioned in the article and from the original novel, Christmas cakes called "tortas de Navidad", is cooked with American ingredients (i.e. chili), thereby crossing both the traditional Mexican taste and American flavors together. In the film however, some of the food cooked maintains the Mexican identity shared by Tita an...

Of all things for Soylent Green to be made of, I would have never guessed from watching this film that the food substitute would be made out of dead humans. This is a very dark and gloomy example of "eating one's problems away"; in order to help solve the problem of overpopulation in the United States, the only viable solution that is presented in this film is literally eating each other out of existence (or, at least, the ones that are already dead). Due to this, the "food" featured in this film is not actually food, or rather food in the sense that we think of.  The actual food featured in the film (i.e. the meat, apples, and vegetables) is all that we see in terms of ordinary, regular food that you would buy at a supermarket today. In addition, this "real food" is a metaphor for how life used to be and represents how plentiful actual food was in the past. Also, the real food from the past represents the actual variety of food that people were eat...

In Mostly Martha, love is depicted in a few different ways. First of all, there is the obvious romantic love and attraction between the two main adult characters: Martha, a German chef who is obsessed with perfection and order in the kitchen, and Mario, a slightly more informal chef from Italy who cooks in a more unorthodox, interactive way. At first, Martha feels as if Mario is to replace her as head chef and initially loathes him, however she slowly begins to accept him as a co-worker and fellow chef. In addition, she becomes more friendly towards him after he succeeds in getting Lina to eat something, which Martha has been unable to do throughout the film. Eventually, this camaraderie between the two adults turns into a romance and the two begin a relationship, and eventually at the end of the film, get married. In addition to the romantic love depicted in this film, another major type of love that appears in this film is that of familial love. After the death of Lina's mother...

In Babette's Feast , the initial role of food in the Protestant congregation was to merely have enough to survive and be able to live off of. For example, before Babette arrived, the people in the village primarily ate ale-and-bread soup, not anything too luxurious or exotic for the townspeople to really sink their teeth into. This demonstrates that, for the small congregation of believers in this film, food is not anything more than a needs for survival, and is not seen as a form of culinary art and exotic taste. Due to this, the congregation have sacrificed their own senses of pleasure and enjoyment and have repressed their emotions for the sake of their religious beliefs, which is of more importance to them. However, despite the congregation's agreement to remain indifferent about the feast that Babette prepares, the colorful, exotic foods eaten by the group (as opposed to the bland, plain soup they're used to eating) eventually succeeds in evoking repressed emotion...