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Lori Thompson

Professor Erin HD

English 112

4/10/19

What They’re Having

In Carole Counihan’s 1999 book, The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender,

Meaning, and Power, she says, ″Food is a many-splendored thing, central to biological and

social life.″ Although is a basic sense all living beings require food to live, food also intrinsically

has influence over culture and social traditions, not to mention it’s emotional weight in human’s

lives. Counihan writes, “Food is a product and mirror of the organization of society on both the

broadest and most intimate levels. It is connected to many kinds of behavior and is endlessly

meaningful. Food is a prism that absorbs and reflects a host of cultural phenomena.”

Food holds a certain power to the relationships humans form with each other that is both

unique to every individual and a universal language. The social cues that food gives us through

imagery and appealing to our senses can be seen in every part of life from nutritional trends,

eating habits, to even the media people watch every day. That isn’t even just to the say

commercials or advertising for foods when watching tv or listening to the radio on our drive to

work. It is a language that is it’s own art, manipulated to a director’s whim in movies to invoke

feeling or set the stage, so to speak. The reception of food imagery in movies can instigate

feelings of identification or of development in the viewers, as this is a language everyone can

speak.
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Most movie-goers probably recognize Quentin Tarantino as the director who puts

gratuitous violence in his movies or indulges in profanity or crass symbolism more often than

not. His movies have a certain air and aesthetic about them when seen from wide angle, so that

when your average Joe watches them, they instinctively know it’s a Tarantino flick. People

recognize the grit, the blood, to gore, because it’s shoved in their faces and out in the open. But

when held up to a microscope, Tarantino’s gratuity and excessiveness isn’t just in the plain

sightline, it’s in between the lines in every little detail, right down to the food the characters are

eating. Because he acknowledges the realism of characters eating food, Tarantino also has an

ability to harness the power such a thing can hold. Food in his movies is used as a source of

power and control, from the Nazis in Inglorious Bastards wining and dining at the finest French

restaurants down to Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction taking a bite out of a stranger’s

hamburger. “I’ve always found restaurant scenes to be kind of ritualistic… They’re always about

the balance of power shifting or being established,” (Tarantino). This is a way to introduce and

develop character be merely showing them doing normal human things, not speaking or moving,

but eating. In a truly subliminal sense, this is not something Tarantino brings to the spotlight and

isn’t intended for your average movie-goer to catch, at least not their first time around watching

a movie, but Tarantino’s use of food and it’s balance or power is a perfect way to give his

audience the impression of his trademark excessive gore, without even showing a drop of blood.

It’s laced through every scene, no weapons needed, only the character we need to learn about and

the kinds of food they eat. Although it’s not something movie-goers may consciously connect,

the gluttonous portrayal of a slave owner constantly gorging on sweets, getting sugar highs, and

even telling other people what to eat in Django Unchained automatically makes us understand

his personality in action, not words.

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Undeniably, the writers of popular or timeless movies are nothing short of geniuses. If

not due to their own artistic sensibilities (admittedly, some famous movies are just bad, or

goodness is subjective), at the very least it’s due to their ability to understand a viewer’s

sensibilities and sell their movies to point that they become timeless. These are stories created to

appeal to everyone, and in order to do that, directors harness the emphasis and relatability of

food that can not only encourage a power dynamic as Tarantino uses it, but to spark comfort or

inflict discomfort on viewers. In several Disney movies, food is romanticized in a child-like

fashion, used as an analog for the senses, to warm us up to the love and affection that we, the

viewers, are placing in the movie for the next two hours. It’s nostalgia, hope, and excitement all

portrayed through stream rising off Tiana’s beignets. In Ratatouille, for example, the kitchen is

warmly lit as though bright and bustling, inviting the viewer to relive their own senses of what a

kitchen is like. Food is used as a demonstration not of gore like in Tarantino movies, but of

pureness and goodness in bringing family and friends around the table and cooking with each

other. Remy, our rat protagonist, sees cooking as what gives him life. “If you are what you eat,

then I only want to eat the good stuff,” He says, commenting on what he wants out of life. Not a

life of eating quickly and without care, but one of sharing his love with everyone, including you,

the viewer. Disney uses this tale of a rat learning to cook to show the comfort, wisdom, and

culture merely spending time with your food can bring – Only the good stuff.

On the other side, food can also bring feelings of discomfort out, by taking the viewer’s

image of how food should be; warm and inviting, and subverting those expectations. In director

Jordan Peele’s first and second movies, he uses food to evoke horror and uneasiness by using it

in not just a creepy way, but merely a way that we are unfamiliar with. The viewers watching his

movie Get Out have likely seen Froot Loops cereal before but seeing the primary villain’s
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daughter eat the cereal with her fingers, one “O” shaped piece at a time, evokes a weirdness all

on it’s own. Actress Allison Williams said in an interview about this visual story telling:

"It drives home the point that she has stalled developmentally at the age that she started

doing the job. She has her teddy bear and Froot Loops and milk... When Jordan was

watching the monitor and I was the [evil] Rose character, he would grin and rub his

hands together, like, 'Yes, this girl is so evil."

In a scene that has almost no words, we instinctively know something up because that’s

just not how we eat that food. Though it is a simple gesture, it again appeals to our subconscious

view of food and it immediately throws the viewer off, bewildered with why she would eat

cereal such a different way. In his sophomore movie, Us, Jordan Peele again evokes horror in an

even stronger way, showing people eating “rabbit, raw and bloody” (Us, 2019). Although many

easter eggs can be found throughout his movies, he uses food in this case to send an extremely

clear message. You don’t have to watch theory videos and read articles to know one thing: eating

raw rabbit is gross, and you, the viewer, should be grossed out right now. It’s not something that

needs to be said, it’s just something we know. Without going too far into spoilers because the

movie only recently came out, it’s simply important to note that food isn’t only used to show

characters eating, it’s used to show comfort and discomfort, evoke memories of the relatable and

stir up distress when faced with the unfamiliar.

Even outside of his gore, Tarantino has also noted, “I do like the fact that when you see

my movies there might be one drink or one piece of food that the audience fixates on and makes

them hungry for that. They want that.” The way that food imagery stays with it’s viewers even

after they leave the theater is a point that cannot be ignored as well. Seeing candy in Willy
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Wonka or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory makes viewers crave sweet. Seeing Bluto spit out a

mouthful of food and call himself a zit in Animal House makes viewers disgusted and horrified

(at least for a moment, before laughing at it). These are nothing less than the subliminal language

of food being passed onto viewers in a way that everyone can understand. Although everyone

has different experiences with food, no one can deny laughter – or mild discomfort - at Meg

Ryan’s Sally faking an orgasm while eating in front of her Harry. If we, the viewers, were sitting

in that diner, we’d probably want to have what she’s having too. It’s an applicable quality that is

prevalent in all media, but especially in movies when we watch a character’s life unfold. If

they’re going to have a life, then they’re going to need food to go hand-in-hand with it, and that’s

where the character’s meals can be used to tell the story or details without words. Food is present

in the beginning, middle, and end. When we meet The Big Lebowski’s iconic “the Dude”, he’s

grocery shopping at a 69 cent store just like everyone else who’s ever needed to scrounge up

money. When we’re warming up to the household items in Beauty and the Beast, they’re singing

a whole song begging Belle (and us) to let them serve her food (beef ragout, cheese souffle, pie

and pudding en flambé!). When we say goodbye to Remy and Linguini in Ratatouille, it’s a

wave over their rat and human-friendly restaurant right on the skyline of Paris with the hopeful

message that anyone can cook. Even in movies that aren’t about food, food can tell you

everything you need to know in one bite.

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Works Cited

Animal House. Directed by John Landis, performances by John Belushi, Universal Pictures,

1978.

Beauty and the Beast. Directed by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, performances by Jerry Orbach

and Paige O’Hara, Buena Vista Pictures, 1991.

Big Lebowski, The. Directed by Joel Coen, performances by Jeff Bridges, Gramercy Pictures,

1998.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Directed by Tim Burton, performances by Johnny Depp and

Freddie Highmore, Warner Brothers, 2005.

Counihan, Carole. The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning, and Power.

Routledge, 2018.

Django Unchained. Directed by Quentin Tarnatino, performances by Leonardo DiCaprio, Sony

Pictures, 2012.

Get Out. Directed by Jordan Peele, performances by Daniel Kaluuya and Allison Williams,

Universal Pictures, 2017.

Inglorious Bastards. Directed by Quentin Tarnatino, performances by Chritoph Waltz, Universal

Pictures, 2009.

Princess and The Frog, The. Directed by Ron Clements and John Musker, performances by

Anika Noni Rose, Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, 2009.

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Pulp Fiction. Directed by Quentin Tarnatino, performances by Samuel L. Jackson, Miramax,

1994.

Ratatouille. Directed by Brad Bird, performances by Patton Oswalt, Buena Vista Pictures, 2007.

Tarantino, Quentin. Interview by Mitchell, Elvis. Quentin Tarantino: Django Unchained, 9 Jan.

2013, https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/the-treatment/quentin-tarantino-django-

unchained. Accessed 4 April. 2019.

Us. Directed by Jordan Peele, performances by Lupita N’yongo, Universal Pictures, 2019.

When Harry Met Sally. Directed by Rob Reiner, performances by Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan,

Colombia Pictures, 1989.

Williams, Allison. Interview by Business Insider. Allison Williams Breaks Down the Infamous

Froot Loops Scene in Get Out, 27 May. 2017, https://www.businessinsider.com/ allison-

williams-get-out-froot-loops-scene-2017-5. Accessed 4 April. 2019.