Query: Food in Hollywood and East Asian Film?

From: Charles Hayford <[email protected]>

Friends;

I will be participating in the panel at the Milwaukee Film and History
conference 8:30 AM Thursday morning, "Food of the Gods: Asian Food and Film
Diaspora."

My paper floats an hypothesis which generates more questions than answers:
In classic Hollywood film (say 1930s-1980s), food is mostly left out or
coded as foreign or ethnic -- "leave the gun, take the cannoli," "a hot
pastrami on white bread with mayonnaise and tomatoes and lettuce." But in
postwar Chinese and Japanese film, food and eating regularly move the plot,
explore relations, reveal character, and express moral and ethical
judgments. Why?

The obvious answer is that food is a stand-in for family and social values,
and that Confucian myths, however tenuous and mutable, and Hollywood myths
yield different stories about family, individualism, society, authority,
and the whole nine yards. On Thursday I'll talk about several classic East
Asian films which are not food films (no Tampopo, Chungking Express, or
Eat, Drink, Man, Woman) to show how this Confucian myth works in them.

My question here is the hypothesis about classic Hollywood films. Jane
Ferry's FOOD IN FILM (Routledge 2003), for instance, intelligently
challenges my generalization, but the exceptions on her list are too few to
destroy it (Age of Innocence, Big Night, Soul Food, Mystic Pizza, Ordinary
People, Better Off Dead). I don't know why food is more important in so
many TV sitcoms and maybe in teen comedies.

Can you come up with scenes of food and cooking in Hollywood films? I don't
want dinner or kitchen scenes where food itself is not the point, such as
"please pass the #$%@! asparagus!" or the food fight in Animal House. No
bar scenes. I'm not even sure that the family dinner in the opening scenes
of Ford's THE SEARCHERS would count, since it's not about the food itself.
Art house films, cannibalism, vampires, and shark attacks don't count
either. Maybe I'd accept Charlie Chaplin's boots or Charles Laughton's
chicken bones in Henry VII, though in the pre-classic Hollywood category.

What I want is Hollywood film scenes where food is not interchangeable (it
could have been the salt or broccoli, not asparagus); not generic; not a
prop (e.g. a pie or a grapefruit in the face); nor part of the scenery; but
plays an active though probably not leading role.

I have an extensive draft bibliography/ filmography/ website-ography which
I will be glad to share when I get it in shape.

Chuck
-- 
Charles W JAEAR.wpd

Charles W. Hayford

Editor, Journal of American-East Asian Relations <http://interworld-pacific.
**com/home.html <http://interworld-pacific.com/home.html>>