"Food is love" is something you've heard a million times if you've watched "Top Chef" or just about any series where the stars wield saucepans. But in the movies, food is not just love. It's everything.
The classic example is "Like Water for Chocolate," where an unfortunate young woman's dreams are thwarted by her family. In both the movie and the novel on which it's based, her emotions — passion, disappointment, sorrow — become ingredients in the food she cooks. The characters who eat what she whips up experience sensual pleasure, worry, even death (it's a tragedy).
Many films, including "Babette's Feast," "Tampopo" and "Eat Drink Man Woman," focus on chopping and flambéing, but movies don't have to be about food to be about food. Just like a movie protagonist who pets (or kicks) a dog, characters' responses to food are a quick way to convey information, even in a movie that doesn't have a feast at its center.
Think of the relationship between Elio in "Call Me by Your Name" and a very ripe peach, or the wholesome milk with which Cary Grant intends to poison Joan Fontaine in "Suspicion." Of how the iconic line "Leave the gun. Take the cannoli" encapsulates the importance of family, even in the violent world of "The Godfather." How Jimmy Cagney weaponizes breakfast in "The Public Enemy." How Jessie Royce Landis reveals nouveau riche coarseness in "To Catch a Thief" by stubbing out her cigarette in a sunny-side-up egg. Remy the rat's dedication (and a food critic's eloquence) in "Ratatouille." How both leads figure out who they are as they master cooking techniques in "Julie & Julia."
A scene in that last movie in which Meryl Streep's Julia Child chops a mountain of onions is one of many in which Streep has proved herself the Escoffier of actors. Her character in "The Hours" casually using the cup-of-your-hand method of separating eggs neatly sums up an expert party-thrower who neglects her own life to keep others happy. Streep's food columnist character cooks throughout "Heartburn." It's crucial to who she is, so it's meaningful when she smashes a pie she made in her cheating husband's face. And the room her baker character presides over in Nancy Meyers' "It's Complicated" is so kitchen-porn perfect it's almost worth sitting through the tedious family dynamics to see it.
The way actors deal with food can also have a lot to do with whether we buy them in roles. This trope seems to have vanished, but for a few years the movies thought it was amusing to include characters who ate nonstop but somehow were still played by rail-thin actors. (To keep that bod, Julia Roberts' food critic in the otherwise awesome "My Best Friend's Wedding" would have to have done a lot of exercising that we never saw.) And who hasn't been distracted from a scene by an actor who supposedly chomps on a burger that is later shown to have a mouse-sized nibble missing?
Obviously, food reveals a lot more than "She knows how to make macarons." It can convey history and culture. In "Soul Food," a matriarch played by Irma P. Hall dishes up comfort food to remind her clan who they are. A diabetic, she can't eat much of it but tells her family, "During slavery, us Black folks didn't have a whole lot to celebrate so cooking became the way we expressed our love for one another."
Class also is delineated in "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover," although that food-centric film about haves and have-nots is not much fun to watch. The following are fun and, as a bonus, provide food for thought.
