Film: Film, Food, and the Culture

By the end of the twentieth century changing demographics were rapidly altering the culinary landscape while increasing the appreciation of non-white food-centered rituals and ceremonies. My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) and Monsoon Wedding (2001) combined traditional ethnic feasts with comedy and passionate romance. Alongside, a mounting interest in food as social entertainment and its role in popular culture led to merchandise inspired by food in film as well as in television. The Mexican-made Like Water for Chocolate was, in fact, based on a novel that included recipes, but in the United States, successful food-centric films have themselves inspired everything from cookbooks to copycat meals at restaurants. Similarly, the television series The Sopranos spawned a “family cookbook” in addition to food products, cooking utensils, and apparel. Indeed, by 1999 television had caught the food wave in force, so that in addition to the success of the Food Network (a cable channel devoted to food preparation, contests, history, and lore), the film Soul Food became a TV series on Showtime, and another cable station offered “Dinner and a Movie,” in which a chef prepared a dish during a film’s commercial breaks. Ten years later cookbooks authored by television chefs dominated the cooking sections of major bookstores, among them, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, co-authored by Julia Child, America’s first famous TV chef, and Simone Beck. The classic 1960s text reemerged as a wildly successful “movie tie-in” after the release of Julie & Julia, whose screenplay was inspired by an amateur chef’s Internet blog. Remarkably, food had entered the realm of new media only to point audiences back to a printed masterwork.