Cultural Flow of Food in Cinema



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	The Cultural Flow of Food in Cinema By April Iommazzo
Currently pursuing an MA degree in Cultural Anthropology at The New School University. April has been the Managing Editor for a trade magazine. She has also lived, worked and studied in Florence, Italy, Bangkok and Thailand.
In this increasingly interconnected world, food provides one way for people to make sense of lives and cultures thrown together. The globalization of food is a major theme in much of popular culture. Food becomes a medium that mobilizes the acceptance of difference. It is known to be a great "uniter." People who come to identify with certain foods seek to identify with certain cultures that are known to create those foods. To explore the culture of food is to explore diverse networks of people, allowing space for them to communicate, relate, and connect on both individual and group levels. As food brings people together, so does the concept of food in the film industry. Many international directors have created movies exploring the global flow of food and how it interconnects different peoples and relationships. And going back to the history of film, we see from theorists Ella Shohat and Robert Stam that cinema provides a feeling of community among people even as it highlights tensions arising from its colonialist past. In the text, “From the Imperial Family to the Transnational Imaginary,” Shohat and Stam discuss that "Cinema helped cement both a national and an imperial sense of belonging among many disparate peoples. [It] has offered the spectator a mediated relationship with imaged [and imagined] others from diverse cultures." (154-156) Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai adds in his book, Modernity at Large, that cinema brings collective solidarity to people and societies. It offers a meeting ground where collectives can assemble and form a "community of sentiment," in which the group can come together to imagine, feel and experience things together. (8) "Collective experiences of the mass media, especially film and video, can create sodalities of worship and charism," writes Appadurai. (8) Going to the movies is an act done by many people, not just one. Therefore, this idea of media spectatorship becomes an adventure, in which it fosters group identities and a sense of belonging.

Food in the Film Industry In Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine, excerpted on the Web site, HYPERLINK "http://www.press.uchicago.edu" http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/243230.html, Priscilla Parkhurst writes that, “The food film has become a staple in the cinematic larder, another sign of the salience of food in the larger culture today.” The concept of the globalization of food in cinema has become a relatively new genre in this day in age. Not until the mid ’80s did this type of film category really break ground. Films, like Babette’s Feast (1987) and Chocolat (2000), touch upon the idea that food reawakens the senses and allows space for new discoveries. Certain foods, which take food as their subject, depict the pleasure it brings to many diverse peoples throughout the world, as it satiates the body and soul. In films like Eat, Drink, Man, Woman (1994) and Mostly Martha (2001) food was used as a metaphor to bring different nationalities and families together. Food represents a form of communicating, relating, understanding, and growing together. Through consumption, food can provide a way of understanding, where conflict may be resolved. In Eat, Drink, Man, Woman, every Sunday night a Taiwanese family would come and eat a huge meal together. Although they never communicate during the week, when they sit down to eat, they end up talking about and resolving their petty conflicts. As the retired chef in this Taiwanese film says, “food from everywhere merges like rivers running into the sea – everything comes to taste the same.” This can be taken in two ways: as an expression of frustration on the part of the cook, and yet, as also a message about food as a means of bringing people together. For the global audience, unfamiliar perhaps with the subtle family dynamics conveyed in the film, the medium of food is one that can serve as a bridge to another culture. In other words, different cultures come to a common ground due to the food that has brought them together. Introducing food as a new type of film genre illustrates one of the many different genres that have come to exist in the context of globalization.

In the French movie, Chocolat, a woman and her little girl come to make a new life in a tiny French town, where everyone knows each other’s business. The newcomers open up a chocolate store and the townspeople learn that the chocolate is made with so much passion and love, that it becomes a form of magic. One woman buys pounds and pounds of it, because she realizes it acts as an aphrodisiac for her and her husband who have sort of “fallen out of love.” The food of chocolate in this movie represents a moral issue and causes much controversy between the town’s priest, who doesn’t deem it fit to open a chocolate shop during the time of Lent, and the consumers who end up recognizing the magic and realizing its necessity for a more fulfilled life. Here, food reawakens once dormant senses and provides new substance to the physical body. Chocolate in this movie is pleasing and good for both the body and heart. Food as the main subject in films provokes new discoveries. The process of cooking and eating explores new discoveries of tastes and smells.In Mostly Martha, an Italian man and his food brought a troubled family together. Food became a way of communicating and understanding each other. Food allowed an aunt and her niece to explore love and friendship. In Babette’s Feast, the ascetic townspeople were influenced by a French woman's food she'd prepared for them. She helped them explore different elements of food and how it can benefit not only your body but your soul too. By eating the French woman’s prepared feast, the town was able to explore new senses and realizations; consuming the sumptuous food, allowed them to forgive each other over immaterial conflicts they once had. The cultural flow of food inspires, binds, and weaves people—family, strangers, cultures, and nations—together. The subject of food is universal, for every culture understands its necessity and its influence. A medium of globalization like food in international cinema represents a pattern of “interconnectedness [that is] mediated by such phenomena as the modern communications industry and new information technology.” (Dennis Altman, Global Sex: 15) The genre of food in film explores sensuality as a necessity for the body and soul. According to Jeremy Iggers, writer for online Web site, Philosophy Now, “Food as a topic for philosophical investigation may be especially timely today. Today, food and eating occupy a role in our culture that only a few decades ago was occupied by sex: food has been eroticized and problematized and made the source of enormous anxiety. I would suggest that in contemporary western societies, this is because there has been a fundamental shift in how we define our selves: a generation or two ago, our individual identity was much more defined by our social roles and relationships - hence the emphasis on sex; today our identities are much more strongly linked to what we consume.” Like shelter and sex, people cannot survive without food. However, in this age, food represents more than just a physical necessity, it serves as a medium to bring people together, it helps resolve conflict within relationships, it reawakens the body and soul, and it operates as a mode of interchange and connectivity. In film and in cultures, food is presented as a powerful force in bringing global peoples together when all else seems to fail. The genre of food in films commenced in the 1980s and is progressing each year with new ideas and new ways in depicting food's essence and the stimulus it provides. In the movies described, food offers a magical element, enlightening the individual to acceptance, forgiveness, love, and understanding. These films do not just depict the necessity of food for survival, but they demonstrate how the concept of preparing and consuming food offers heightened new senses of renewal and acceptance as well as reawakening the passions, leading to a more fulfilled and valued life.


CITATIONS, SOURCES, LINKS, NOTES: View Movie Trailers Mostly Martha http://www.paramountclassics.com/martha/ Chocolat http://www.jbmultimedia.co.uk/IMDB/chocolat-lo.html Eat, Drink, Man, Woman http://videodetective.com/home.asp?x=y&SpeedTestResults=144000&PublishedID=5523&AltID=&CustomerID=97135&WM=True&Ads=True&Play=TRUEBIBLIOGRAPHY Altman, Dennis. Global Sex. The University of Chicago Press, 2001. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. The University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1996. Ferguson, Parkhurst, Priscilla. Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine. University Chicago Press, 2004. "HYPERLINK " http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/243230.html " http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/243230.html Iggers, Jeremy. Philosophy Now, http://www.philosophynow.org/archive/articles/31iggers.htm. 2001 Shohat, Ella & Stam, Robert. “From the Imperial Family to the Transnational Imaginary” in Bob Wilson's and Wimal Dissanayake's Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary. Duke University Press, 1996.