The consumption of food in pop culture

Why do we see so many fictional characters eat?

There is one scene in contemporary cinema that captivates the joy of eating like no other: Chris Messina devouring a bruschetta in “Julie and Julia”. Messina’s satisfaction, while biting a perfectly crunched bruschetta, toasted in olive oil and topped with juicy tomatoes, is a poetic depiction of what it means to enjoy eating.

The movie, “Julie and Julia”, emphasizes the role of food in everyday life in an extreme way, yet it shows perfectly a way of understanding contemporary living through eating and its symbolic function in our lives. This comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with Nora Ephron’s body of work; in Ephron’s world, food is high art. Her book, Heartburn, is about food and divorce; her movie “When Harry Met Sally” is about food and falling in love; and, “Julie and Julia” is about food and falling in love with food.

“Julie and Julia”, even if it is not a perfect movie by all accounts, is successful in what it tries to do; it is a love story, with a twist. It features two female leads, Julie and Julia, who are both happily married. Yet, “Julie and Julia” still carries a romantic-comedy vibe, as per Ephron’s usual cinematic style. The women might not fall in love with a guy, but they do fell in love; with food. In the film, food is used as a tool of empowerment. Julia Child, who is a real person, learns how to cook while in France, without speaking the language and without having any basic idea of cooking. And, by the end of the movie, she can speak French fluently and she can cook better than a French chef. In real life, Child loved cooking so much that she became the person who familiarized the American public with French cuisine, by hosting her very own TV cooking show. In a parallel universe, Julia decides to start an online blog about cooking Child’s recipes, to combine her two great talents, writing and cooking, with an escape from reality.

In this film, Ephron shows us the emotional turmoil that is cooking – whether it is ruining an omelette, or, trying to murder a lobster in excessive amounts of butter; by the simple and ordinary act of cooking in a vital room of own’s home, the kitchen, a bond is created between the audience and the heroines. For Ephron, it is clear that love, happiness, food, and pleasure are inextricably bound together. And, sometimes, Ephron is using cooking as an alternative for showing your true feelings about something, or, someone.

In her book “Heartburn”, Rachel and Mark are eating spaghetti Bolognese in bed after having sex for the first time. They eat thick slices of overtopped pizza while learning that they are expecting their first child together. When Rachel goes into labour, she is thinking about the roast lamb in the oven. When Rachel discovers Mark’s affair, she runs to her father’s apartment and eats mashed potatoes in front of the TV in the middle of the night. When she gets back together with Mark, she cooks for him rich in fat dinners, in an attempt to win back their normality and lure him into falling in love with her again. And, finally, when Rachel realizes that she is living in a lie, she takes her homemade lime pie and throws it to Mark’s face in the middle of a dinner party. “And the dream breaks into a million tiny little pieces, which gives you a choice. You can stick with it, which is unbearable, or you can just go off and dream another dream”, Ephron writes. This is what Ephron’s world is made of: imperfect people cooking imperfect food while creating imperfect memories.

In the same way, Amy Sherman-Palladino has created a universe that feels like home with two heroines who eat constantly. The ‘Gilmore Girls’ have voracious appetites; they spend most of their days at Luke’s diner, talking as fast as possible over a hamburger, or, on Friday night dinners with Emily and Richard Gilmore. They start their mornings with a Pop-Tart accompanied by a litre of coffee, and they end their nights with an extra-cheesy pizza, another litre of coffee, and, possibly, a Donna Reed film. Food exists throughout the show as a big part of Gilmores’ lives and as a critical factor to the show’s success. Their inability to properly feed themselves makes the audience grow closer to them. It is what makes them cool, quirky, and relatable. When Rory admits to Lorelai that she can cook and sometimes she makes dinner for herself at home, the audience can see the character’s growth – Rory is an adult.

When words become insufficient to describe the growth or the emotional state of a character, food becomes a language in itself. Creatives use food to convey universal feelings, such as love, comfort, or sadness. Haruki Murakami, for example, uses food as the only thing that keeps his characters attached to the real world – food becomes the in-between place that connects a surrealistic story with normalcy. Tory, in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, prepares food in a ritual. He is unemployed and has just lost his cat. Every time that the phone rings, which are important times for his character’s future, he never picks it up until he has finished preparing his food. At first, he is making spaghetti; later, a sandwich with cheese and tomato. Toru is fighting to keep a routine in face of everything that is happening and the time he spends preparing his food is the only thing that keeps me away from a surrealistic plot, even for a second. A few chapters later, Toru is preparing a stir fry with green peppers and he is waiting for his wife to come home. When she arrives, they fight – she cannot believe that he is cooking stir fry with green peppers; a meal she detests. Their marriage has come to an end. When she doesn’t come home one night, Toru eats breakfast alone in the kitchen for the first time since his marriage. An ending and a new beginning.

Many people crave junk food when they feel sad – like Rory, who ate an enormous bucket of Ben and Jerry ice cream in the famous “I am ready to wallow now” scene. Many people miss their appetite when they are anxious, or, overwhelmed – like Jude in ‘A little Life’. Others eat alone when they’d rather share a bite with a loved one – like Tory in ‘The Wind-Up Chronicle’. Often, people destress themselves by cooking dinner, or, decompress by simply chopping vegetables.

Food is rarely just food; writers use it as a reminder of the ordinary and this entails power. Being relatable is the most difficult thing for a fictional character. When fictional characters eat, cook, or talk about food, their behaviour immediately becomes familiar to the audience. Food gets its own, subversive voice. Eating belongs to the basic human activities that are vital for physical and social survival and, at the same time, it evokes feelings, memories, and cultural associations. The meeting of food and imaginary worlds (such as novels, TV-series, and cinema) is a realistic depiction of everyday human existence. It acts as a language of symbols within a language of words; food becomes an endless world of interpretation.