Do You Deserve to Eat?
Tracing how cinema captures food’s evolution from sustenance to a performative luxury.
“The appetite grows by eating.” - François Rabelais.
Being 23 years old has given me the insight and lived experience of nearly every trend cycle in the modern digital age. From platform to platform, the curation of what we deem luxury has been an overhanging presence throughout my entire adolescence, and likely many readers as well.
As a child and teenager in the 2010s, luxury goods were advertised on various social media platforms, including Snapchat, Instagram, and now TikTok. It was already shocking enough to watch the Internet turn into a platform for materialism rather than creation, with very few authentic creators in the present era of social content, but the recent trend cycles have put humans in their most vile and insulting form yet.
It was just yesterday that I came across a video featuring a Los Angeles-based TikToker speaking about Mountain Valley water, leaving the trend cycle, with Icelandic replacing the former dignifier of luxury. Perhaps the joke is a simple bit of comedy surrounding $10 water on its own, but being at the forefront of soulless materialism in LA, it’s been hard to navigate where people truly draw the line.
In the echo chamber of $50 lunch plates from Erewhon, “What I Eat in a Day” videos, and influencers shifting from shopping hauls to cooking videos, it’s more common to see performative cooking rather than activism. In this day and age, in which I roll my eyes every time I open the hellscape of an app, TikTok, I don’t even know what’s worse.
This movement is at an interesting intersection of bizarreness and absurdity, with food content existing as fairly shallow in itself. Perhaps the exact reason so many influencers have found a “calling” in promoting prebiotic sodas and French butters is that the ads themselves let them skip over their personalities entirely. Therefore, the same people who have refused to emphasize their platforms in ongoing genocide and starvation over the past couple of years can dangle their $300 farmers market haul in front of you without a single lick of repercussion.
There are other arguments within the fetishization of nourishment involving eating disorder culture, body checking, and materialism in the face of conflict, but for the relevance to the case today, it’s most important to first question how food has become a new luxury product.
It has perhaps never been such an unfortunate time for a coincidence as disgusting as this to happen, in which the romanticization of food’s “social value” occurs simultaneously to ongoing wars purposefully revoking many individuals' right to nourishment.
It is situations like this in which I only know how to emphasize what’s come before us, in the cinemas, of course. In such an immoral era, it’s likely time to go back to basics and show ourselves the hole we could be digging deeper into if action isn't taken to stop the ongoing domino effect of materialistic absurdity.
It is thus only necessary that we examine the artistic endeavors and commentary before us to see if we can repair the damage.
The man with an everlasting tiff with elitist Western European society, Luis Buñuel, first attacked the immoral behavior at the top of society in his 1961 piece, Viridiana. Viridiana, the film’s main and titular character, struggles with a choice of joining a convent for a life of service or reconnecting with her only family member, Don Jaime. A whirlwind of a film casts Viridiana back and forth between the newly discovered family estate and the convent, where she faces persecution for her shift in worldly and religious views. The relevance of Viridiana in this argument comes at the film’s end, when a group of beggars on the farm breaks into the family’s home. It is then that the impoverished live like kings for a day, starting with a feast that resembles Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper and soon spiraling into an elitist nightmare. The dinner devolves from eating into chaos filled with a food fight, sexual assault upon various characters, an orgy, and the inevitable burglary and destruction of the home itself. The scene showcased the tiniest sliver of power, in this case, the bare necessity for life, food, leading the lowest in class down a path of unchallenged power, in which we reveal the true evils in those with power over us. The unprecedented critique of power not only solidified Buñuel as a frontrunner in social and political commentary but also led to the film being banned in Spain for many years.
More straightforward renditions came along soon after, notably Marco Ferreri’s 1973 piece, La Grande Bouffe (or The Great Eating), which took a straight shot at bourgeois society. His dark comedy centers on a group of friends who congregate for a celebration in which they intend to eat themselves to death. Ferreri arrived guns blazing to an already hot topic in Italian society, and his satirical display of absurd consumerism immediately put him in the middle of controversy, until his film’s purpose matured over time to become all the more relevant, solidifying it as a cult classic.
Equally intentional in its message was Peter Greenaway's The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. Another critique of elitist society utilized lavish imagery and food to showcase the violence, abuse, and absurdity connected with the bourgeoisie, all intertwined with a mundane restaurant. The restaurant is merely the theater in which capitalism plays out; the food remains the key factor and weapon that catalyzes the subsequent violence, power, and wrath. The hyper-stylized restaurant and eventual cannibalistic final act show the turning point in society in which total luxury is revealed to be absolute horror.
Plenty of other filmmakers took their shot at the topic as well. Bong Joon Ho’s 2013 piece Snowpiercer displayed an apocalyptic dystopian nightmare in which classes were divided amongst train cabins. The impoverished at the back are given the indistinguishable protein block as their source of food, only to reveal that the substance’s composition consists of cockroaches infesting the train. All the while, the upper class dines on sushi bars, diverse cuisine, and luxury meals in the front cabin, with even more to share but no desire to help those in need. Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006) displayed a young, naive Kirsten Dunst as the historical figure who bounced through life at Versailles in complete oblivion to the world around her. While starvation ravaged the French, Coppola started every luxurious day with a feast in all the atypical Sofia fashion, with an endless supply of pastries, seafood, fruit, and champagne. Yet, every meal consisted of mere crumbs, and just as ignorant as the power couple themselves, the estate would toss away all that went uneaten. Even in animation, these issues persisted. Hayao Miyazaki’s masterpiece Spirited Away (2001) demonstrates one of the most haunting displays of gluttony in a kids' movie ever. Chihiro, our navigator for the film, watches as her innocent parents are turned into mere pigs, with the only goal ahead of them being to consume everything in sight. Of course, our antagonist, the domineering No-Face, casts the greatest disgust of all, with a never-ending consumption cycle that emphasizes his emptiness in excess. It is then that food becomes intertwined with nourishment and spiritual well-being, and that the subsequent overconsumption only leads to inevitable corruption.
It’s films like these that we can look at in utter disgust, yet also use to challenge the absurdity of the quite similar present-day. It’s a fruitless effort, but navigating the darkest sides of cinema can hopefully emphasize that hopefulness upon the pendulum swinging in the other direction. In the meantime and in rebuilding it’s equally important to remind ourselves of food’s true power.
Tampopo (1985), by Juzo Itami, teaches that food is a form of love language in itself. In a surreal, dark Japanese comedy, it is unveiled that our admiration for the meals we share and prepare for one another replicates all the ways we love another person, but might not know how to say those exact words. Babette’s Feast (1987) by Gabriel Axel showcases the unchallenged labor needed to please those around you, yet equally important, how all the preparation is worth only another’s happiness in the end, and nothing in return. The Color of Pomegranates (1969) by Sergei Parajanov presents food as more than mere nourishment and as a symbol of culture under persecution. Food, in this case pomegranates, shows an undying Armenian spirit that refuses to go down in the face of Soviet persecution, a form of culture now a symbol of a culture that refused to lose its light.
What lingers is the uneasy sense that food may never fully return to its most elemental role as long as it is flattened into content: optimized, aestheticized, and sold back to us as lifestyle. Still, that loss does not absolve us of the responsibility to remember what it once meant, and what it can still be. Cinema preserves those meanings: food as care, as inheritance, as the quiet language we reach for when words fail. In an economy that profits off every appetite, the real danger is not just how we consume, but that we forget how to recognize those deeper meanings at all. If we hold onto these stories, if we continue to see, cook, and share with intention, then food can still resist becoming spectacle and remain what it has always been at its best: a way of caring for one another.
