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For The Love of Food

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 storge, has also had its importance shown through food quite often. The image of a happy family sitting around a dinner table is a part of almost every culture around the world. After a busy day at work and at school, sitting together for a meal and to talk about the day's events is a way to bring the whole family together. Even though many families do not participate in this tradition every day, the idea of a sunday or saturday dinner is a standard part of many people’s lives. Family celebrations are celebrated by a special meal. If no one in the family cooks, then special occasions are often marked by going “out to eat.” In media, family dinners are where drama happens. A group of people are forced to interact with each other at a dinner table, regardless of whether they’re laughing, arguing, or tensely avoiding an important issue.
In “Mostly Martha” there is a pointed lack of people eating together. One of the scenes in the film that establishes Martha’s conflict early on, is when she sits at her dinner table with a nice meal, with no one sitting with her. In another scene, she cooks dinner for her therapist, but doesn’t eat any herself. In a reaccuring scene, her fellow chefs are seated at a table enjoying a meal, while Martha’s sits with them not eating, and not participating in any conversation. While she does at one point ask her neighbor to join her for dinner, the gesture is accidently received as romantic, causing Martha to back off before she lets herself get hurt.


When Martha loses her sister, and Lina loses her mother, both of them refuse to eat at all. Their reactions to the tragedy is to isolate themselves, and as food is a representation of the connection between people, their refusal to eat represents just how much they are distancing themselves from others. The turning point of the film, when Lina starts eating again, is when the two characters begin to accept each other into their lives, and when they finally have a “picnic” together with Mario, it’s a representation to just how close they have grown to each other


Martha’s initial dislike for Mario, as well as gradual affection and love for him, is shown through the exchange of food between them. When Mario first arrives and asks for her recipe, she is shocked and offended that he would even ask. When he pesters her to try the pasta he made, she takes a bite just to humor him, and acts unimpressed with the quality. She begins to accept him just a bit when he is able to convince Lina to eat, but her affection and love for him isn’t really fully formed until she takes the step of letting him cook for her. This love is culminated in the scene where he feeds her soup he made while she wears a blindfold, under the guise of her guessing the ingredients of the soup, but we all know that Mario was using is as a way to kiss her from the beginning.


In short, food is love, absence of food is absence of love, and cooking for and eating with others is the friendship, affection, and love that people share.



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