Autonomy in the Kitchen?

Considers instead the relationship between women and food, in professional and domestic environments. Cooking is presented as a way for women to assert themselves and their independence, while at the same time allowing unconventional negotiations of gender, class, and race with their environment. Fried Green Tomatoes (Avnet, 1999), No Reservations (Hicks, 2007) and its German predecessor Mostly Martha (Nettelbeck, 2001), Waitress (Shelly, 2007), The Ramen Girl (Robert Allan Ackerman, 2008), and Julie & Julia (Ephron, 2009) present the lead (white) female characters as powerful and autonomous, but the films collectively work to undermine the characters’ political agency at the expense of their ability to function in the kitchen. As such, they tend to privilege a heterosexist perspective and elevate white characters over characters of color.

Introduction

The introduction follows the emergence of food films as an international genre before its success in the U.S, also discussing the concept of genre, and whether we can talk of a food film genre. The section also explores the connection between food film and embodiment, above all in terms of physical reactions of the viewers. It then investigate the increasing relevance of food in cultural and social debates in the US, and well as its growing visibility in the media

Conclusion

Considers food films within the broader context of representations of food and points to a newer body of documentary and docufiction food films, as well as fictional films, that approach the intersection of food, cultural citizenship, and identity from significantly different vantage points. In many ways, these works respond to and critique the collective body of narrative food films. Films include works as diverse as Fast Food Nation (Linklater, 2006), Supersize Me (Spurlock, 2004), Food Inc. (Kenner, 2008), Jiro Dreams of Sushi (Gelb, 2011), and McFarland, USA (Caro, 2015). Unlike the other films examined throughout the book, they put food at the center of social and political debates that tend to appear in the background or are discretely ignored in other media.

Food Films and Consumption

Focuses on restaurants as one of the key spaces in contemporary global food culture that have recently acquired media visibility in the practices imaginary of educated consumers, allowing them to convey their identities in terms of cultural capital, connoisseurship, and cosmopolitanism. Restaurants appear as places where chefs express their skills and creativity, in constant negotiations with their customers’ preferences, media pressure, and business priorities. Big Night (Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott, 1996) and other movies that focus on restaurants and chefs, like Dinner Rush (Giraldi, 2000), Waiting (McKittrick, 2005), Today’s Special (Kaplan, 2009), Hundred-Food Journey (Lasse Hallström, 2014), and Chef (Jon Favreau, 2014), assume a critical point of view vis-à-vis mainstream U.S. food culture, revealing the tensions, contradictions, and inequalities in food business. However, their distribution and self-representation through marketing reiterate the stereotypes the films appear to target. By focusing on restaurants and the chefs that command them, while playing with the gender, class, and ethnic identities of the protagonists, as well as their social status, food films help to construct notions of good taste and citizenship while defining educated consumers by appealing to their sense of cultural capital.

When Weirdos Stir the Pot

Explores recent animated films that embrace the idea that belonging to a community does not require conformity to social expectations, but rather builds on the protagonist’s individuality and seeming queerness. In box office hits like Ratatouille (Bird, 2007), Kung Fu Panda (Osborn and Stevenson, 2008), and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (Lord and Miller, 2009), and in the lesser known Bee Movie (Hickner and Smith. 2007), The Tale of Desperaux (Fell and Stevenhagen, 2008), character development connects closely with food, which becomes the instrument of the heroes’ redemption even when it would initially appear to be the very cause of their social isolation. This raises the question: What models of acceptable adulthood – in terms of gender, class, ethnicity, and body image - does the interaction with food present to viewers, in particular children, who are arguably among the main marketing targets of these productions? Although cooking is still often culturally framed as an element of the domestic and feminine sphere, in these films food is not domestic or related to care work, and as such appears as more culturally acceptable for males.

Culinary Comfort

Explores unusual – and often culturally problematic – models of masculinity and their relationship to food, taking into consideration male characters as nurturers and caretakers both in the private and the public sphere. The analysis considers how these films operate in seeming opposition to films that tend to use food unobtrusively to reinforce dominant models of masculinity. Under closer examination, movies such as What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (Lasse Hallström, 1993), Heavy (James Mangold, 1995), Eat Your Heart Out (Percy Adlon, 1997), and later Spanglish (James L. Brooks, 2004) and Sideways (Alexander Payne 2004), reveal that these seemingly different and innovative images reiterate mainstream forms of manhood and thus reinforce gender hierarchies. Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Eat Drink Man Woman (Ang Lee, 1994) provide the necessary background to the discussion about the relationship among men, cooking, and masculinity.

Magical Food, Luscious Bodies

The films explored in this chapter configure the magic qualities of food as an extension of the bodies of the women—often exotic—who prepare food. In fact, these movies often embrace an approach that takes inspiration from the literary style of magic realism, where women metaphorically become food, often thrown away or in need of management because of their unruly nature. This chapter, which includes an analysis of Simply Irresistible (Tarlov, 1999), Woman on Top (Torres, 2000), The Mistress of Spices (Mayeda Berges, 2004) and Chocolat (Hallström, 2000), illustrates how food becomes fetishized, gendered, and racialized in Hollywood films much in the same way that women’s bodies have been treated by mainstream U.S. media. Food is often feminized in mainstream food media, and the configuration of food as magical via the extension of the female – and often non-white - bodies that prepare food into the food itself, underlines the pornographic potential of food imagery.

Consuming the Other

Analyses food films that invite audiences to visit the homes of ethnic others as vicarious tourists. The Joy Luck Club (Wang, 1993), Soul Food (Tillman 1997), Tortilla Soup (Ripoll, 2001), What’s Cooking (Chadha, 2000), and My Big Fat Greek Wedding (Zwick, 2002) operate as forms of mediated culinary tourism. While the previous chapters focus predominantly on the ambivalent representations and treatment of femininity and masculinity, this chapter suggests that mainstream food films carefully appeal to the ethnic groups they represent while offering them as object of culinary tourism of mainstream white audiences through the presentation of familiar—although vaguely exotic—food. The films provide an unstable means of educating audiences about the foodways of different ethnic groups in the U.S., as they reiterate stereotypes and lace ethnicity with expectations and biases, also in terms of gender and class.