Laura's Reel Food and World Cinema Blog

I have a lot of mixed feelings about the movie Like Water For Chocolate. The magical-realism is something that I’m not used to seeing in american movies. It’s strange to see a movie where there is clearly some sort of magic, but that magic isn’t the main focus of the story. The story is about Tita and her tragic love for her sister’s husband, Pedro. The magical realism is just one of the tools used to tell that story. The movie starts right away with Tita being born accompanied by a biologically impossible rush of water, apparently her tears from inside the womb. This is not remarked as an incredible result of magic by any of the characters, and even the narrator only remarks on it as a testament to Tita’s sensitivity to onions. That sets up our expectations for the rest of the movie. It says to the audience, “A bunch of weird stuff is going to happen, just don’t question it.” Dr. McNichols briefly mentioned how magical-realism is much more common in international films than i...

When preparing for the apocalypse, the first thing people worry about, after water and shelter, is food. This makes sense, as food is one of the items listed right at the base of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Most sci-fi films are at least somewhat apocalyptic in nature, whether it’s post-apocalyptic or preventing an oncoming apocalypse. Most of the time, sci-fi movies are about survival. What's one of the few things humans need to survive? Food. Another important theme in sci-fi is technology, and Forester explains that “technology and the body” are two elements that are important to the study of both food and science fiction. Food is created through the means of technology, and is used to fuel the body. Science fiction often focuses on how technology affects the body. Through these two facts we can determine that food is one of the many ways to make the connection between technology and the body in science fiction. In many films in the sci-fi genre, food is shown to ...

Food has long been used as a metaphor for love in romance in almost every form of media. When it comes to romance and romantic love, aka eros, since the dawn of time, foods from oysters to chocolate to asparagus have been rumored to be aphrodisiacs. If there’s a scene where two characters are eating oysters, or chocolate covered strawberries, or offering the other a bite of food, the meaning is clear to the audience. Even if the meaning isn’t clear, they’ll include appropriate background music to really hammer home the point, as well as make anyone watching the movie with their parents extremely uncomfortable. In real life, one of the most common ways to tell someone that you’re interested in them romantically, is to ask them out to dinner. While dinner is not the only “date” a person can be asked out on, it’s certainly frequent enough that most movies and tv shows portray a first date as two people sitting across from each other at a dinner table. However, familial love, aka storg...

I’m not particularly familiar with the relationship between food and protestantism, which is really due to the fact that I’ve never experienced any sort of protestant holiday or service. What I do know about the protestant faith, both from the film Babette’s Feast and from past history classes where I learned about Martin Luther, is that protestants vehemently avoid the enjoyment of earthly pleasures, including things like dancing and fine food. On one end of the spectrum is hedonism, and on the other end is protestantism. What interests me about this is how different this relationship between religion and food is how different it is from the religious experiences I’ve had in my own life. At my grandmother's house in West Virginia, the very solemn methodist easter sunday service I went to was followed by an easter dinner with a ham and all the trimmings. At the reform jewish synagogue I went to growing up, the Friday services were followed by the oneg, where the temple gather...