On Food in Film (Series #7)

This December, enjoy these love letters to the art of cooking and the creative process

Still from ‘Babette’s Feast’ (1987) (#37 on our original List)

Cinema is best at appealing to two of our five senses: sight and hearing.

Despite what your local 4DX theater will have you believe, our eyes and our ears are our primary vehicles for receiving stories, ever since there were stories to begin with. I’m sure that deep in Silicon Valley Mark Zuckerberg is currently working on adding smell, taste, and touch to his Metaverse, but until then those senses are really pretty absent when it comes to art in general.

The depiction of food in film can be charted all the way back to the 19th century (a decade that gets little representation on our list for cinema, we promise we’ll get at least one film from that era on our list someday), featuring in a series by the inventors of cinema themselves, the Lumière Brothers. The series was titled Actualités (actuality films) and featured simple clips of people doing ordinary things: one such short being titled “Jumping Onto a Blanket”. As my research tells me, the short “Repase de Bébé” (Baby’s Breakfast) may very well be the first recorded instance of food being depicted in film. Check it out right here!

For the first half of film’s history, food could only be displayed in film in black-and-white, and that meant a lot of the food you see in scenes could easily be portrayed cheaply in plastic or wax (when it’s not visibly being eaten onscreen).

This is not to say that there aren’t memorable dinner scenes from these decades, but the limitations on the technology at the time could only go so far to truly portray a scrumptious meal. Digital cinematography would eventually allow for more intimate shots of the process and a realism that simply couldn’t be achieved through old-school means. With the advent of television and shows like The French Chef leading to the debut of The Food Network decades later, technology evolved- even in animation- to portray food in an intimate, granular nature.

Our culture around food has also changed significantly: with the Internet, every fool with a stove could be Wolfgang Petersen or Julia Child, and there became increased demand for, quite simply, better food than what was being offered by most fast-food chains or fast casual restaurants.

There also are the robust parallels between being a chef and being a filmmaker: both are reliant on a singular auteur to provide vision yet always involve collaboration when working at the highest level. These parallels are almost stupidly obvious in Jon Favreau’s best film, Chef, which will be one of the films on our list.

(L-R) John Leguizamo, Emjay Anthony, and Jon Favreau star in Chef

All this being said, the films we have chosen range from 2007 all the way to as recently as 2023. Almost every one of these films can be viewed equally as both odes to cooking as well as metaphors for either filmmaking or the creative process. They utilize digital cinematography to focus on the intricacies of the process (including 3D animation) and the one crucial component each of these film has is that it will absolutely leave you feeling hungry afterwards. There is a striving for realism within each film that is so acute that many of the recipes for the dishes within the film can be found online.

Another common component amongst these films is the ability of food to unite people together- a great example of such a film is one that’s already been on our list (and therefore will not be on this one), Babette’s Feast. Just like a great film playing in theaters, a great meal is best enjoyed shared with others, and are loaded with memories that often take us back to an idyllic or memorable time in our lives.

So this December, kick back and enjoy these five hand-picked films dedicated to the love of food, cooking, and the creative process.

And remember, anyone can cook.

(Also, how ironic is it that our last ‘100 More Movies’ post before introducing this series was Silence of the Lambs?)