While food is a gateway to diffuse many stressful situations, it is also sometimes a bridge to build awkward conversations, situations, friendships, and sometimes even fights.
“Good food is like music you can taste, colour you can smell.” Ratatouille gets us. In this series ‘Food for Film,’ we pick food films/shows that make our mouths water and our souls richer.
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Cooking and I have had a strange relationship. I am not much of a good cook, but I do enjoy cooking. Growing up, I never really turned my way towards the kitchen until I moved out of my home, my comfort zone to Mumbai. It was then that I picked on a few minute survival skills in the kitchen arena.
However, my real deal is I see cooking as a solitary act, prepped in my space and on my pace. I fumble and get conscious in company and often ruin the broth.
Cooking alone feels meditative, at par with a modern-day form of self-care. I tend to focus more and even if I make a mistake, no one’s watching, hence in turn allowing me to make good discoveries as well. No matter you cook for one or a family of 20, the brief moment between turning on a stove to plating the meal is the most calming one.
I felt this meditative emotion while watching Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman, where the meticulous act of preparing a meal is nothing less than transcending. Established in the opening scene, it is highly specific and immaculately detailed. The prep is not a half-hearted rendering, but deliberate — conveyed through colour and shape, and texture and sound — but also through a precise depiction of cooking methods, of deboning and washing and frying and plating. Followed by fresh, bright green vegetables being washed, crackling mushrooms frying, dumplings stuffed to the brim and meticulously folded, chicken stuffed into a porcelain dish to marinate, and so on until Mr Chu, the protagonist, finally finishes the meal’s preparation. While this may sound clinical, the resulting scene is sumptuous, not sterile.
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This attention to detail is then echoed by the gestures of love throughout the film, linking the idea of love as an earned, deeply felt, intimate emotion built on care and respect. The resulting meal for his three daughters, Jia-Chien, Jia-Jen, and Jia-Ning, is an elaborate expression of care for his family. Each time Chu and his daughters gather, his meticulous preparation is disrupted by their “announcements,” and more broadly, the inescapable passage of time. They all live at home, partly out of their fathers’ desire to keep them under his roof. As his daughters aged, his pulse on them weakened, and Chu needs a vessel for these reserves of affection which comes through food.
While food is a gateway to diffuse many stressful situations, it is also sometimes a bridge to build awkward conversations, situations, friendships, and sometimes even fights.
Remember When Harry Met Sally? While enjoying a pastrami and rye sandwich, Harry [Billy Crystal] and Sally [Meg Ryan] get into a heated argument over whether women fake their orgasms. To prove a point, Sally gives a very convincing performance in the middle of the restaurant… and then casually smiles and returns to her lunch as if nothing happened. Everything about this scene is pure gold — including that epic one-liner from a fellow customer: “I’ll have what she’s having.”
In my favourite Greta Gerwig film, Frances Ha, food is a friend-making tool. In one of the film’s most powerful scenes, Frances attends a dinner party with wealthy, successful professionals who speak a different life language than her own. Awkward but determined to meet all manner of struggle with a wobbly smile on her face, she tries connecting with the people who seem to be out of her league. “I want this one moment,” Frances begins, her voice breaking, she bares all, and after revealing so much, she nervously retreats. She’s oblivious to the interest on her audience’s face. Frances has finally connected, and she doesn’t notice.
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When Liz Gilbert [Julia Roberts] in Eat, Pray, Love takes her first bite of Margherita pizza, it’s almost as if you can smell the cheese and tomato sauce through the screen. And the fact that she uses this opportunity to give her pal the ultimate pep talk on self-love (“It is a moral imperative to eat and enjoy that pizza!”) makes this scene even more memorable. We eat in search of these epiphanous bites, capable of triggering emotional responses that have as much to do with how a dish makes you feel as to how it tastes.
Until last year, I and my bestfriend would look up recipes, buy fancy coffee and ingredients, and cook during weekends. Not on an impulse to learn, but it gave us a sense of independence, and subconsciously helped us to create memories. We would plate them, sit on the floor like the bachelors we were, and discuss life. When I went back home during the lockdown, I would make dishes learnt during my stint as a bachelor, and serve them to the family and cousins. There would be feedback [tons of it], an abomination to the use of garlic, and sometimes even apperception. But most of all, it would lead to conversations, tons of it on the dining table.
I am married now, living far in the hills [really] and cook [sometimes] for two. I have all the space in the kitchen to cook alone, and at my pace. But I realise it now, it could never be a solitary act, for food is best devoured in a party than one. It is to build connections; friendships for food is the ultimate love language.
Read more from the series here.
Food for Film. Illustration by Poorti Purohit
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