Short description:

"Anne Bower's Reel Food is an intellectual feast, where each essay serves a delicious new course filled with meaty morsels and delightful aromas. It provides thoughtful lenses in which to view the culinary dimensions of all films, but be prepared to reexamine the taste sensations of traditional food movies, such as Chocolat, Babette's Feast, Eat Drink Man Woman, and Tortilla Soup. I ignored the incessant urge to put the book down and head to out to the video rental store to pick up the films devoured in this book. I'll never look at a movie without seeing its culinary dimensions in new ways. So, make some popcorn and settle down in your easy chair--you're headed for a great read." -- Andrew F. Smith, editor-in-chief, Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America
"From sci-fi to horror, from romance to adventure, the films discussed in this collection are enriched by cogent analyses of the ways food is used to signal issues of cultural identity, assimilation, and conflict. With Reel Food, you won't need popcorn
." -- Darra Goldstein, Editor, Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture
"Reel Food is the go-to book for anyone interested in the rich intersections between food and film studies. The compelling, wide-ranging essays gathered here demonstrate that if you are interested in film, then you can't ignore food, and vice versa
." -- Doris Witt, author of Black Hunger: Soul Food and America

Long description:

Reel Food is the first book devoted to food as a vibrant and evocative element of film, featuring original essays by major food studies scholars, among them Carole Counihan and Michael Ashkenazi. This collection reads various films through their uses of food-from major food films like Babette's Feast and Big Night to less obvious choices including The Godfather trilogy and The Matrix . The contributors draw attention to the various ways in which food is employed to make meaning in film. In some cases, such as Soul Food and Tortilla Soup , for example, food is used to represent racial and ethnic identities. In other cases, such as Chocolat and Like Water for Chocolate , food plays a role in gender and sexual politics. And, of course, there is also discussion of the centrality of popcorn to the movie-going experience.
This book is a feast for scholars, foodies, and cinema buffs. It will be of major interest to anyone working in popular culture, film studies, and food studies, at both the undergraduate and graduate level.

"Anne Bower's Reel Food is an intellectual feast, where each essay serves a delicious new course filled with meaty morsels and delightful aromas. It provides thoughtful lenses in which to view the culinary dimensions of all films, but be prepared to reexamine the taste sensations of traditional food movies, such as Chocolat, Babette's Feast, Eat Drink Man Woman, and Tortilla Soup. I ignored the incessant urge to put the book down and head to out to the video rental store to pick up the films devoured in this book. I'll never look at a movie without seeing its culinary dimensions in new ways. So, make some popcorn and settle down in your easy chair--you're headed for a great read." -- Andrew F. Smith, editor-in-chief, Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America
"From sci-fi to horror, from romance to adventure, the films discussed in this collection are enriched by cogent analyses of the ways food is used to signal issues of cultural identity, assimilation, and conflict. With Reel Food, you won't need popcorn
." -- Darra Goldstein, Editor, Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture
"Reel Food is the go-to book for anyone interested in the rich intersections between food and film studies. The compelling, wide-ranging essays gathered here demonstrate that if you are interested in film, then you can't ignore food, and vice versa
." -- Doris Witt, author of Black Hunger: Soul Food and America

Table of Contents:

1. Watching Food: The Production of Food, Film, and Values, Anne L. Bower       

Section I: Cooking Up Cultural Values   

2. Feel Good Reel Food: A Taste of Cultural Kedgeree in Gurinder Chadha's What's Cooking?, Debnita Chakravarti      

3. Food, Play, Business and the Image of Japan in Juzo's Tampopo, Michael Ashkenazi       

4. Il Timpano- "To Eat Good Food is to be Close to God": The Italian-American
Reconciliation of Stanley Tucci's Big Night, Margaret Coyle       

5.Cooking Mexicanness: Shaping National Identity in Alfonso Arau's Como agua
para chocolate, Miriam Lopez-Rodriguez     

6. Chickens, Jams, and Kitchens: Modern Food and Malay Films of the 1950s and 1960s, Timothy P. Barnard     

7. "I'll Have Whatever She's Having": Jews, Food, and Film, Nathan Abrams       

8. Food as Representative of Ethnicity and Culture in George Tillman Jr.'s Soul Food, Maria Ripolli's Tortilla Soup, and Tim Reid's Once Upon A Time When We Were Colored, Robin Balthrope 

Section II: Focus on Women--the Body, the Spirit    

9. Gendering the Feast: Women, Spirituality, and Grace in Three Food Films, Margaret McFadden       

10. Food, Sex, and Power at the Dining Room Table in Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern, Ellen J. Fried     

11. Anorexia Envisioned: Mike Leigh's Life is Sweet, Chul-Soo Park's 301/302, and Todd Haynes's Superstar, Gretchen Papazian    

12. Production, Reproduction, Food, and Women in Herbert Biberman's Salt of the Earth and Lourdes Portillo and Nina Serrano's After The Earthquake, Carole Counihan       

13. Images of Consumption in Jutta Bruckner's Hunger Years, Yogini Joglekar     

Section III: Making Movies, Making Meals   

14. Appetite for Destruction: Gangster Food and Genre Convention in Quentin
Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, Rebecca L. Epstein       

15. "Leave the Gun; Take the Cannoli": Food and Family in the Modern American
Mafia Film, Marlisa Santos   

16. All-Consuming Passions: Peter Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, Raymond Armstrong       

17. Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's Delicatessen: An Ambiguous Memory, an Ambivalent Meal, Kyri Watson Claflin     

18. Futuristic Foodways: The Metaphorical Meaning of Food in Science
Fiction Films, Laurel Forster    

19. Supper, Slapstick, and Social Class: Dinner as Machine in the Silent Films
of Buster Keaton, Eric L. Reinholtz

20. Banquet and Beast: The Civilizing Role of Food in 1930s Horror Films, Blair Davis        

21. Engorged with Desire: Hitchcock Films and the Gendered Politics of Eating,
David Greven

22. What About the Popcorn? Food and Film-Watching Experiences, James Lyons