Food in Cinema, Performance and Eat Art

Food as a means of creating meaning in cinema, and iconic scenes

The lecture considers food as a significant cinematic device. It explains that food in a film conveys personality, socioeconomic status, cultural context and thematic ideas about society, gender roles, race, ethnicity and class. The speaker cites memorable food scenes—for example, in When Harry Met Sally, Rocky and Goodfellas—to show how engaging and iconic they can be. Historically, food played a supporting role, providing pleasure, narrative or atmosphere; the emergence of the “food film”, however, made it a central focus.

Food conveys context: place and time

The choice of ingredients, cooking methods and serving traditions can indicate geographical and historical circumstances.

Visual and auditory details—crockery, glasses, cutlery and the place where food is served—situate the story in particular cultural moments and locations.

Food symbolises social themes: wealth, poverty, love and loss

The presence, absence or quality of food symbolises economic circumstances: a luxurious dinner versus a shortage of food.

Emotional states and relationships, such as romance and grief, are reflected through shared meals, refusal of food or solitary eating.

Characterisation through attitudes to food

Preferences, taboos and eating habits reveal characters’ personalities, backgrounds and values.

What people eat or avoid, and the ways in which food is served and consumed, provide insight into character dynamics and development.

Material culture: tableware and ways of serving food

Visual indicators of status

Crockery, glasses and cutlery signal social and economic status, for example porcelain versus disposable tableware. The setting of a meal—a formal dining room versus a café or an improvised place—reveals class differences and social norms.

Serving context as narrative information

How and where food is served reflects family structure, hospitality traditions and power relationships. The style of service, whether shared dishes or individual portions, hints at cultural values and hierarchies within relationships.

Food as a lens on society and roles. Reflecting and shaping social constructs.

Food consumption reflects the society created by the director and comments on norms and inequality. Food can reinforce or question traditional roles: gender roles within the family, and relationships between different racial, ethnic and economic groups.

Negotiating identity and power

Cooking, serving and eating can reinforce or disrupt expectations about who cooks, who eats first and who controls resources.

The exchange of food across cultures can reveal tension or solidarity between social groups.

Memorable food scenes and their functions. Entertainment and memorability

Food scenes are enjoyable and often become iconic, increasing audience engagement. Examples include the café scene in When Harry Met Sally, Rocky drinking raw eggs for breakfast, and the prison cooking scene in Goodfellas.

Multiple functions within narrative

Historically, food has served as a source of pleasure, a narrative device and a means of producing comic, erotic or dramatic effects. Such scenes establish tone, pace and character relationships effectively while remaining vivid and memorable.

The emergence of the “food film”. A shift from supporting to central role

Until recently, food was secondary; with the emergence of “food films”, it became the central theme. Such films make cooking and dining the principal driving forces of the narrative.

Food as comedy Remember black-and-white silent films and cakes flying straight into the characters’ faces?

There is something inherently comic about a cake. Pie-throwing was long the gold standard of comedy. A crowd hurling pastries at one another and covering cars and passers-by with whipped cream is one of the immutable laws of slapstick. A banana exists to be slipped on, and a cake to be thrown at someone. The use of cakes for comic effect appears to have been one of the earliest uses of food in cinema: the device originated in the silent era and survived successfully into the 1960s.

Historical examples

• The Battle of the Century (1927): this physical comedy was characteristic of Laurel and Hardy’s films, popular in the 1920s–40s. The film is famous for using more than 3,000 cream pies in its climactic scene.

• The Great Race (1965): this film holds the distinction of featuring the largest pie fight in cinema history.

Not all comedies are created equal.

The classic scene in which Charlie Chaplin eats his boots when facing starvation shows the full drama of gold prospecting in comic form. It is an iconic moment from The Gold Rush (1925), the film by which Chaplin himself said he most wanted audiences to remember him.

In the film, two prospectors during the Klondike Gold Rush in Yukon, Canada, are trapped in an Arctic cabin and suffer from hunger. Forced to eat his boot, Chaplin’s character retains his dignity and treats it as an exquisite delicacy. His cabin companion has a different imagination: looking at Charlie, he sees a giant roast chicken. The boot in the film was actually made of black liquorice.

In 1980, director Werner Herzog really did cook and eat his own shoe after losing a bet. Herzog cooked the footwear—the same pair, he claimed, that he had been wearing when the wager was made—at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, with chef Alice Waters’s involvement. The shoes simmered for five hours with garlic, herbs and duck fat. As part of this performance, Herzog reflected on the value of cinema, emphasising that from time to time we must be reckless enough to do such things.

Italian Neorealism and the symbolism of food in post-war cinema.

This lecture examines the history of Italian cinema, paying particular attention to two key areas: Italian Neorealism after the Second World War, and the symbolic use of food in Italian films, especially in the 1950s and 1960s.

• It explains how Neorealist films depicted post-war economic hardship and society’s moral condition, often through location shooting and non-professional actors.

• Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette) illustrates themes of scarcity, hope and social tension, particularly in the poignant meal scene involving Bruno.

• The lecture also explores how food, especially pasta, became a symbol of “Italianness” in cinema. An example is the climactic spaghetti scene in Poverty and Nobility (Miseria e nobiltà), featuring Totò, which embodies Neapolitan poverty and comedy.

Italian Neorealism as a movement

• Defined as a film movement that emerged after the Second World War, characterised by stories about the lives of the poor and the working class.

• Filmmakers used location shooting and frequently employed non-professional actors to heighten realism.

• The movement sought to depict Italy’s harsh economic and moral conditions after the war and twenty years of Fascist rule.

• Food scenes served both to enhance realism and to participate in contemporary cultural and political debates about Italian identity and social conditions.

Social tension: food scarcity versus abundance

• Neorealist films emphasised the stark contrast between food shortages among the working class and abundance among the wealthy.

• This contrast highlighted wider social tensions in post-war Italy and reflected Fascism’s legacy.

• Food was portrayed as more than sustenance: it was a marker of inequality and a lens through which national problems could be discussed.

Focus: how food scenes contribute to the depiction of social tension and hope. In this Neorealist masterpiece, food is not simply fuel but an emotional barometer. The key moment for analysis is the lunch scene in the trattoria.

• Contrast (aesthetics versus a social abyss): we see an attempt to create a “small celebration” amid catastrophe. Antonio takes his son Bruno to a restaurant, trying to play the role of a comfortably situated father. Aesthetically, this is a moment of intimacy: the tablecloth, wine and hot food can be interpreted as an attempt to restore dignity through ritual. But the social commentary ruthlessly shatters this idyll. At the next table, Bruno sees a wealthy family and a boy eating mozzarella in carrozza, a mozzarella sandwich.

o Gastronomic symbolism: the strand of melted cheese stretching from the wealthy boy’s food is a metaphor for unattainable carefree ease. For Bruno and Antonio, their modest pizza is the limit of what they can afford, beyond which lies the abyss of hunger.

o Conclusion: the scene shows how fragile comfort is. Food works here as a “painkiller”, providing a brief respite—hope—but its very taste is poisoned by anxiety about the future: social tension.

Comparison: food as a symbol of Italianness (1950s–1960s)

Works: Poverty and Nobility (Miseria e nobiltà) versus Bicycle Thieves.

Here we compare two poles of Italian hunger: the tragic and the carnivalesque.

• Poverty and Nobility (the spaghetti scene): here, food is catharsis. The final scene, in which Totò’s characters descend upon an enormous tureen of spaghetti, is more than dinner: it is a pagan dance of the stomach.

Contrast: they dance on the table and stuff their pockets with pasta in tomato sauce. This is high comedy—aesthetics—masking an animal fear of hunger: social commentary. Pasta is a symbol of life that must be physically claimed in order to survive. It is the poor person’s “gastronomic orgy”.

• Bicycle Thieves (restraint): unlike Totò’s Neapolitan exuberance, food here marks shame and limitation. Pasta or pizza does not fly through the air; it is counted in lire.

• Conclusion: in both cases, pasta is the nation’s “code”. In the comedy, however, it symbolises abundance and vitality against all odds, while in De Sica’s drama it emphasises scarcity and the class divide.

Investigation: non-professional actors and location shooting

Topic: their influence on realism through the lens of “real flavour”.

The use of non-professionals in Neorealism can be compared with using wild, uncultivated ingredients in fine dining: it provides a flavour of “terroir” that cannot be imitated.

• Faces as an era’s menu: by casting workers and ordinary people from the street, directors obtained faces on which the history of war was written. This is the “neurogastronomy” of cinema: viewers read authentic exhaustion and hunger because these are lived rather than acted. Performance—aesthetics—gives way to documentary truth: social fact.

• The street as a set: filming amid ruins and in real streets created an atmosphere in which the city became the main character. This is not a “refined studio” but reality’s rough texture. It is like coarse wholemeal bread compared with a factory-made roll: there is grit in it, but there is life too.

Essay: “The Geopolitics of the Empty Plate”

Topic: cultural and political debates through scarcity and abundance. Essay:

In post-war Italian cinema, a bowl of soup was never merely soup. It was a political manifesto. If we view the screen as a nation’s menu, Neorealism offered a dish called “Honest Poverty”.

Through the contrast between scarcity and abundance, directors discussed where Italy was heading after twenty years of Fascism. On one side, we see the aesthetics of the upper bourgeoisie: full tables, mozzarella, white tablecloths. This is the image of Italy promised by propaganda and pursued by the “economic miracle”. On the other side is the social commentary of the streets: workers’ empty stomachs, stolen bicycles as a means of earning bread, and pasta in jacket pockets. Food became a complete language of communication in this dispute. Abundance on screen was often marked as morally suspect or inaccessible, while scarcity sanctified the protagonist, making him a martyr of the system. Neorealism showed that the taste of bread depends directly on society’s conscience. And that taste was bitter, but real.

Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette): plot and thematic focus

• The story centres on Antonio, who obtains a job putting up posters that requires a bicycle for transport; his bicycle is stolen on the very first day.

• Antonio and his son Bruno wander through the city searching for the bicycle, symbolically seeking hope amid economic despair. The narrative emphasises stress, hopelessness and a bleak future, especially through young Bruno’s perception.

The meal scene as a moment of respite and symbolism

• A particular lunch scene offers a brief respite, as Bruno experiences good fortune and carefree pleasure like the more privileged boy eating mozzarella.

• Food in this scene provides temporary relief and a glimmer of hope for father and son while also emphasising how fleeting their respite is.

• The scene embodies the film’s broader themes: hope, class inequality and the fragility of comfort amid constant deprivation.

Pasta as shorthand for identity and context

• In the 1950s and 1960s, plates of macaroni or spaghetti were often used in films to define characters and situations quickly.

• Food acted as a cultural symbol embodying “Italianness” and providing audiences with immediate contextual clues.

Case study: Poverty and Nobility (Miseria e nobiltà)

• The film’s final scene is described as an “immortal ode to pasta”, featuring Felice, played by Totò, and his friends.

• After being forced to go without food for three days, the characters, who are pretending to be aristocrats, feverishly fall upon a dish of spaghetti.

• Their frenzied meal includes dancing on the table and stuffing spaghetti into their pockets, indicating both hunger and a desire to stock up against future starvation.

• The scene reflects “the whole world of Naples”, blending poverty with comedy and highlighting Totò’s performance, which uses food to convey both social reality and cultural identity.

Food films—origins, themes and cultural

The lecture introduces and analyses the “food film” genre that emerged in the 1970s, explaining how technological advances in filmmaking and a growing cultural interest in cooking allowed filmmakers to make food the principal star. It describes the defining characteristics of such films in detail: a focus on cooks, kitchens and the visual presentation of dishes; and the use of food-related stories to explore identity, power, class differences and cultural norms. It also outlines recurring themes such as desire, disgust, national and ethnic identity, changing traditions and masculinity in cooking. The lecture lists landmark examples from different cultures and notes the exclusion of films centred on cannibalism. Its aim is to teach viewers to perceive and interpret food in cinema critically.

The origins and definition of food films

• Emergence in the 1970s The genre originated in the 1970s. Its emergence was driven by growing public interest in food and technical developments in the film industry that made food cinematography more visually appealing.

• Food’s central role In food films, food is the “star” and remains central throughout. Cooks are often the protagonists, linking the narrative to culinary spaces and professionals.

• Visual techniques and locations Cinematography often uses close-ups and panning shots in which food fills the screen, emphasising texture, colour and presentation to engage viewers. Principal settings include kitchens, dining rooms, food shops and food trucks, showing both everyday and professional gastronomic environments.

• Narrative functions Storylines consistently portray characters negotiating identity, power or class through food, using culinary practices and shared meals as narrative tools. Food reinforces or challenges cultural norms; the films present engaging adventures that reflect what society considers normal.

Audience connection and cultural influence

• Universal appeal Eating is a universal activity that enables viewers to identify with characters, even in animated films. The familiar processes of eating and cooking create bridges of empathy across diverse audiences.

• Reflection and norms Through their stories, food films invite reflection on cultural norms, potentially reinforcing traditions or challenging the status quo. The genre uses gastronomic narratives to investigate social constructs and personal identity.

Recurring themes

• Desire and disgust Food films repeatedly communicate themes of desire—pleasure, appetite and sensuality—and disgust—aversion and taboo—by drawing on visceral responses to food.

• National and ethnic identity Food serves as a marker of national and ethnic identity, revealing cultural heritage, migration, assimilation and pride through cuisine.

• Ethnicity and changing traditions Stories often address ethnicity and the evolution of culinary traditions, exploring tensions between preserving established practices and changing food habits.

• Masculinity in cooking The genre explores masculinity in cooking by examining gender roles, professional kitchen hierarchies and changing perceptions of men in culinary spaces.

Canonical examples and exclusions

• Landmark films: genre-defining examples include La Grande Bouffe; Tampopo; Babette’s Feast; Like Water for Chocolate; Eat Drink Man Woman; Big Night; Chocolat; Soul Food; Tortilla Soup; Ratatouille; and Jiro Dreams of Sushi. These films span different cultures and styles, illustrating the genre’s breadth.

• Excluding cannibalism: films in which cannibalism is central are excluded from this lecture’s list of food films. Examples are Delicatessen and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover.

• Analytical aim: by analysing these films, viewers can learn to “truly see” food in cinema, understanding its thematic and narrative significance.

Film analysis: Babette’s Feast. Negotiating identity and power through food.

In this film, food is more than nourishment: it is a complete language of communication capable of dismantling ascetic dogma. We observe a sharp contrast—aesthetics versus social commentary: the grey, tasteless soup eaten by the villagers symbolises their rejection of earthly pleasures in pursuit of spiritual salvation. This is their “norm”, their social construct.

But Babette changes the balance of power by investing all her resources, and her soul, in creating an authentic French dinner. The preparation of turtle soup shocks both the audience and the characters, bordering on disgust—a visual technique that elicits a visceral response. Yet a transformation takes place when the camera moves to close-ups of the finished dishes, filling the screen with texture and colour.

Key moment: the table scene. We see taste and smell becoming a direct connection to the guests’ subconscious. The strict Puritans experience catharsis as they savour quails in sarcophagi. Food is an instrument of power here, but power that liberates rather than oppresses. Through haute cuisine, Babette restores their lost memories and emotions, turning the culinary space into a place of reconciliation and empathy.

Comparison: Eat Drink Man Woman versus Soul Food. Preserving traditions and national identity.

Both films use food as a marker of ethnic identity, but approach it from opposite sides of the barricades.

• Eat Drink Man Woman (Taiwan): here, haute cuisine is a language that replaces words. The father, a chef, loses his sense of taste—a neurogastronomic tragedy—but continues speaking to his daughters through elaborate, ritual Sunday dinners. Tradition appears weighty, demanding enormous skill and discipline. Generational conflict is resolved through the table: food remains the only constant in a changing world. The cinematography emphasises professionalism: quick knives, steam and fire form the “matrix” of Chinese cooking.

• Soul Food (USA): in this film, cooking is less a matter of craftsmanship than the family’s “glue”. Tradition is more democratic and “domestic”. Food indicates the clan’s cohesion. Where food in the Taiwanese film is art and ceremony, here it is comfort and survival.

Conclusion: in both cases, we see a cultural code preserved through food. Changing traditions are shown through refusal or acceptance of participation in these rituals. Food becomes an anchor holding the characters’ identity together when the external world—the social context—tries to divide them.

Masculinity in cooking: Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Hierarchy and the male role in the kitchen.

The film about Jiro is an ideal illustration of masculinity in cooking through the lens of monastic devotion. Here, the kitchen is not a place of creativity in the usual sense but a rigid hierarchical structure resembling an army or monastery.

Jiro is an absolute patriarch. His style is one of minimalism and perfectionism. He “reads the matrix” of fish and rice better than he reads people. We see the professional space of the kitchen completely displacing personal life. Masculinity is expressed through total control and the suppression of emotion for the sake of results, rather than through brute strength. Jiro’s sons live in their father’s shadow, and their path is one of endlessly repeating the same actions in pursuit of an unattainable ideal. This is a story about a man fulfilling himself through restraint and discipline, with sushi becoming the only worthy language of communication with the world.

Assignment 4. Desire and disgust: Tampopo. Visceral reactions and breaking taboos.

Tampopo skilfully plays in the territory of “desire/disgust”, combining gastronomy and eroticism.

The egg-yolk scene: this is the essence of desire. The camera uses an extreme close-up to show a yolk passing between the lovers’ mouths. Food ceases to be nourishment and becomes pure sensory pleasure, an instrument of seduction. The moment’s aesthetic intensity is pushed to the limit.

The oyster-and-blood scene: here, the director deliberately introduces disgust, a taboo, to intensify sensuality. The mixing of food with bodily matter, blood, creates shock and leaves the viewer balancing between nausea and voyeurism. These scenes work through contrast: the ordinary act of eating becomes intimate, breaking social norms of propriety. This is neurogastronomy in action: the viewer’s brain simultaneously receives signals of hunger and arousal, producing a powerful emotional response.

Essay: animation and taste memory in Ratatouille. Identification through a “direct connection to childhood”.

In the animated film Ratatouille, we find perhaps the most precise example of how taste works with memory. The protagonist is a rat, which in itself creates dissonance and disgust in a kitchen context: a social commentary on a “dirty animal” in a sanctuary of cleanliness. Yet this barrier collapses because taste is universal.

The key scene is the moment when the critic Ego tastes the ratatouille. Here, a mechanism operates that I call a “direct connection to childhood”. One bite of a simple peasant dish instantly transports the cold snob to a warm evening in his past.

Why does it work? Visually, animation allows the effect to be heightened: we literally see the colour palette and light around the character change. This moment enables any viewer, regardless of age or culture, to identify with him. We all have that “taste of childhood” capable of melting the ice of cynicism. The film shows that haute cuisine can be defeated by the sincerity of simple food when it is prepared with feeling. It is the triumph of empathy over snobbery.

Eating and temptation—La Grande Bouffe

Marco Ferreri’s cult 1973 film La Grande Bouffe is considered one of the first food films, although it does not quite resemble contemporary examples. Its four protagonists—a pilot, a chef, a television star and a judge—decide to eat themselves to death on exquisite food. They retire to a villa, invite prostitutes and are later joined by a schoolteacher. They indulge in gluttony and sex, the prostitutes flee, and all four protagonists die one after another. Bouffer is French slang for “to stuff oneself”. The film is grotesque, comic and frightening. It was a savage satire of consumer society. Food serves as a metaphor for the meaningless routine of desire and satisfaction under capitalism.

Eating and temptation—Babette’s Feast

At the opposite pole is the Danish film Babette’s Feast (1987), based on Karen Blixen’s story of the same name, which tells of asceticism and hidden temptations.

Babette’s French dinner transformed a devout Danish village and earned the film the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1988. Babette’s Feast explores the conflict between self-denial and sensual pleasure, presenting great culinary art as a way to awaken true spiritual grace. After the meal, the guests forget old grievances, rekindle former love, join hands in a circle and begin to sing. They may not have understood every subtlety of the extraordinary dinner, on which Babette spent 10,000 francs, but they feel its uplifting effect in their souls.

Creating identity—Tampopo

The Japanese comedy Tampopo (1985) is another food film released at around the same time.

Tampopo tells the story of a lorry driver and his companion who help Tampopo, whose name means “dandelion” in Japanese, save her failing ramen shop and become a fearless master of ramen.

The film is a comedy about the complexities of Japanese culture. Several stories are woven into the plot, each reflecting a particular aspect of the characters’ relationship with food. And the film’s true star is, of course, ramen.

Challenging traditional roles—Like Water for Chocolate

Like Water for Chocolate (Como Agua Para Chocolate) is a 1992 Mexican film in the magical-realist style, based on the popular novel of the same name published in 1989 by Mexican writer Laura Esquivel.

The film’s central theme is tradition and gender roles. Its main conflict lies in a family tradition that forbids the youngest daughter, Tita, from marrying so that she can devote herself to caring for her mother. Through Tita’s magical cooking, however, which ultimately frees the family from these conventions, Tita and her sister not only break barriers and gender roles in their society but also help establish a tradition of treating one another as equals.

Food in art—independent study

Swiss-Romanian artist Daniel Spoerri was an influential figure in conceptual food art and was associated with Fluxus. The Fluxus movement emerged in 1960 as a response to the art world’s elitism and insularity.

Fluxus aimed to break down the boundaries between art and life.

Food was one of the principal themes of Spoerri’s work, and he called this aspect “Eat Art”.

One form of this art was his “snare-pictures of eaten meals”.

Spoerri took the remains of a meal on a table, fixed them to its surface with spray adhesive, and then hung the table on a wall, turning a horizontal surface into a vertical one.

As early as 1961, Spoerri declared certain food products to be artworks by marking them with a rubber stamp reading Attention Oeuvre d’art, or “Attention: work of art”.

He stamped shop-bought tinned foods at Galerie Koepcke in Copenhagen.

Three years later, he organised a performance called Restaurant de la Galerie J in Paris, where he cooked food himself over several evenings.

Art critics acted as waiters, playing on the idea that a critic “serves” art to the viewer and helps explain the work. Spoerri was one of the first artists to use food in art in an attempt to answer the question:

“What turns everyday life into a work of art?”

In 1967, he introduced the term Eat Art.

His motto was:

“When all other arts disappear, the noble art of cooking will remain.”

Spoerri planned and held large banquets as part of his Eat Art concept until 2001.

One was Déjeuner sous l’herbe, “Lunch beneath the Grass”—“The Burial of a Snare-Picture”.

The banquet was conceived as a neo-avant-garde artistic act. A theatrical lunch for 120 guests was organised in the grounds of a château. At its end, the twenty tables at which the guests had eaten were buried in a forty-metre trench exactly as they had been left after the meal, as snare-pictures, without gluing the objects down.

Eat Art asked not only “What is art?” but also “What is a restaurant?”

Many conceptual artworks raise these questions again and again.

One such project was the restaurant FOOD in the 1970s.

Alison Knowles

Alison Knowles first presented Make a Salad in 1962 as a leading member of the Fluxus group of artists founded in downtown New York.

Knowles has presented the work at least a dozen times. She explained:

“Anyone can enter this work of art simply by eating it.”