Appetites and Anxieties: Food, Film, and the Politics of Representation

CONTEMPORARY APPROACHES TO FILM AND TELEVISION SERIES

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Barry Keith Grant

Brock University

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Robert J. Burgoyne

University of St. Andrews

Caren J. Deming

University of Arizona

Patricia B. Erens

School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Peter X. Feng

University of Delaware

Lucy Fischer

University of Pittsburgh

Frances Gateward

California State University, Northridge

Tom Gunning

University of Chicago

Thomas Leitch

University of Delaware

Walter Metz

Southern Illinois University

APPETITES AND ANXIETIES

FOOD, FILM, AND THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION

CYNTHIA BARON, DIANE CARSON, MARK BERNARD

WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

DETROIT

© 2014 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

18 17 16 15 14                                          5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Baron, Cynthia.

Appetites and anxieties : food, film, and the politics of representation / Cynthia

Baron, Diane Carson, Mark Bernard.

pages cm. — (Contemporary approaches to film and media series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Includes filmography.

ISBN 978-0-8143-3431-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8143-3805-6 (ebook)

1. Food in motion pictures.      2. Motion pictures—Social aspects.    3. Documentary films—History and criticism.    I. Carson, Diane, 1954–   II. Bernard, Mark.    III. Title.

PN1995.9.F65B38 2013

791.43'6564—dc23

2013018443

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Cultural and Material Politics of Food Representations in Film

1. Foodways as an Ideological Approach

2. Food and Film Industries: A Filter for the Food We See in Films

3. Foodways Syntax: Utopian Films’ Use of Food to Create Community

4. Foodways Structured to Convey Disorder and Dysfunction

5. When Humans Are the Food Product: An Ideological Look at Cannibal Films

6. Food as Threat and Promise: Genre and Auteur Analysis

7. Foodways in Documentary Films: Consumer Society in a Wider Frame

8. The Politics Surrounding Documentaries’ Depiction of Foodways

9. Food as a Window into Personal and Cultural Politics

Appendixes

1. Insights from Food Stylist Ann Schulz

2. Selected Fiction Films Featuring Foodways

3. Selected Food Documentaries

4. Selected Work in Food and Cultural Studies

Notes

Works Cited

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I first want to thank my colleagues Diane Carson and Mark Bernard for their adventurous spirits and unfailing enthusiasm. Thanks also to the many food scholars who inspired us, in particular Carole Counihan and Warren Belasco. Special thanks to Lucy Long, whose 2001 NEH Food as a Humanities Subject seminars suggested ways that food studies could enhance studies of film, and to the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society for the 2011 fellowship that facilitated research. Sincere thanks to family and friends, especially Emily Baron and Donald McQuarie, for their patience, humor, and interest in film and good food.

—CYNTHIA BARON

Throughout this exciting, educational project, I’ve benefitted enormously from the camaraderie of my hard-working, inspirational coauthors, who have enhanced every aspect of this venture. I thank my best friend and spouse Wil Loy for hours of stimulating conversations about food, film, and life. I also thank my dear friend Ann Schulz for generously sharing her diverse food stylist experiences. Her knowledge about food never ceases to amaze me. I deeply appreciate my friend and fellow film reviewer Martha K. Baker, who scrupulously read early versions of my work. And thanks, finally, to my many associates who offered their keen insights concerning food in film and in their lives.

—DIANE CARSON

I thank my co-authors, Cynthia Baron and Diane Carson, for inviting me along on this amazing journey. Thanks to Sean Moncrieff and all acknowledgments the folks at NewsTalk Ireland for having me on the air to discuss work featured in this volume. Thanks to Dan Charles at NPR and Stephen Rust at the Ecomedia Studies blog for sharing my work on food and film with a larger audience. Thanks to Pamela Robertson Wojcik and everybody at Notre Dame who organized the Food Networks conference in January 2012. Finally, thanks to Fred and Linda Bernard, Bill, Pam, and Brandon Davis, and especially Hope Bernard, who continues to inspire and sustain me.

—MARK BERNARD

We would all like to express our appreciation to filmmaker Daniel E. Williams for doing the frame captures and, finally, to Annie Martin, Barry Keith Grant, and everyone at Wayne State University Press for their faith in this project and for making it a reality.

Earlier versions of sections of this work were previously published as "Food and Gender in Bagdad Cafe," Food and Foodways 11:1 (2003) (reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis); "Dinner and a Movie: Analyzing Food and Film," Food, Culture & Society 9:1 (2006) (reprinted by permission of Food, Culture & Society); "Cannibalism, Class, and Power," Food, Culture & Society 14:3 (2011) (reprinted by permission of Food, Culture & Society); and "Transgressing Boundaries: From Sexual Abuse to Eating Disorders in 301/302," in Seoul Searching: Culture and Identity in Contemporary Korean Cinema, ed. Frances Gateward (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007) (reprinted by permission of the State University of New York, All Rights Reserved).

Introduction

The Cultural and Material Politics of Food Representations in Film

Films depend on food. Slapstick comedies need pie-throwing scenes that escalate into brawls. To build their resolve, tough guys in westerns and action films down shots of cheap liquor. Gangsters talk with their mouths full. Noir detectives drink alone. Comradeship leads soldiers and officers to share food and drink. Melodramas require disastrous, sometimes heart-warming family dinners. Romantic comedies benefit from chocolates.

Mainstream American cinema is a mosaic of memorable food scenes. In Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941), the breakfast scene montage illustrates the deterioration of the marriage between Charles (Orson Welles) and Emily Kane (Ruth Warrick). In The Godfather (Coppola, 1972), Don Corleone (Marlon Brando) aims to amuse his grandson but inadvertently shows himself to be the frightening monster he really is when he makes fangs out of orange peels. In Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994), hit men Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) and Vincent (John Travolta) reveal their whimsical worldviews as they discuss the European names for American fast-food burgers. Food is important in remarkable but obscure international films. In Jeanne Dielman (1975), Belgian director Chantal Akerman highlights the drudgery of cooking by showing meatloaf preparation in real time. In Bedevil (1993), Australian Aboriginal filmmaker Tracey Moffatt parodies a cooking show to comment on the troubled legacy of colonial rule. In John Crowley’s Irish film Intermission (2003), the characters’ multipurpose use of brown sauce marks them first as losers and then as inventive extemporizers.

These examples, which likely bring others to mind, are reminders that food regularly functions as a meaningful component of films’ mise-en-scène. Filmmakers rely on food to convey characters’ personalities, cultural backgrounds, social status, and evolving personal relationships. As cultural anthropologists Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik point out: Food touches everything (3). People cannot transcend those connections. Instead, food is the foundation of every economy (Counihan and Van Esterik 3), and the institutions of power that shape a society’s food production and distribution systems impact all aspects of human life. Food is intimately bound up with social power, and thus all interactions involving food are necessarily laden with the implications of social status, cultural difference, ethnicity, sexuality, and other markers of identity. Even in private space, converging and disparate cultural forces shape people’s participation in meals and meal systems that reflect an endlessly evolving enactment of gender, family and community relationships (Counihan and Van Esterik 3).

Analyzing reasons that food has become an important cultural and research topic, Counihan and Van Esterik note that feminism and women’s studies have contributed to the growth of food studies by legitimating a domain of human behavior so heavily associated with women over time and across cultures (1–2). They highlight the politicization of food and the expansion of social movements linked to food and suggest that studies of food politics have helped to create an increased awareness of the links between consumption and production (2). Counihan and Van Esterik find that the explosion of the field of food studies since the early 1980s parallels the increase in food journals, the appearance of food films, the rise of food documentaries, and the emergence of food movements that promote organic, local, fairly traded, and slow food, which together challenge what fast, processed food has done to our bodies and communities (2).

Scholars contributing to the rapid growth of the food studies field propose that people in consumer society should think seriously about food. Warren Belasco points out that Food is important. In fact, nothing is more basic (Meals vii). Echoing that perspective, Sidney Mintz notes, If you cannot eat, soon enough you will not be able to stay alive (Food and Eating 26). Starvation might be a distant consideration for most people in industrialized countries. Yet today, adequate nutrition, food safety, and basic food security pose local and global crises: Some eight hundred million people can’t afford the food they need and an even greater number—now some one billion people—are obese and suffering from unbalanced diets (Wilson xi).

These realities are staggering, yet they do not surprise people who have been following health and agricultural debates. On the one hand, food companies and the government agencies that facilitate the industrial food system emphasize individuals’ need to eat rationally; they propose that reliance on water, fertilizer, and pesticide-intensive agriculture is the only solution to food security problems. By comparison, middle-scale farmers and agro-ecology researchers argue that industrial food practices must be curtailed before more irreparable damage is done. They find that industrialized food production has produced short-term gains but that the extravagant use of fossil fuels, unlimited water, and an array of chemicals has led to the specter that peak oil is now linked to peak water [which] is now linked to peak soil and so [also] to peak food (Wilson xi). In other words, given the interconnected roles that fossil fuel, irrigation, and topsoil resources now play in food production, the point at which petroleum extraction reaches its maximum rate will also be the point when food production reaches its maximum. With water tables falling as irrigation consumes 70 percent of the world’s fresh water, with topsoil eroding faster than new soil forms on perhaps a third of the world’s cropland (Brown Food Shortages), and with estimates that conventional crude oil production has peaked or will peak within a decade, lower crop yields now caused by rising surface temperatures and countries’ increased reliance on biofuels make declining food supplies one effect of climate change and an important factor for contemporary society.

Existing alongside the studies that underscore the need to address food security problems, work on food and culture emphasizes that procuring and consuming food is fundamental to our lives, not only for survival but also as it concerns our conceptions of ourselves and our perceptions of the natural and social environments (Jones et al., Prologue xii). Thus, while eating is a biological necessity, it is also an intellectual experience for people whose personal and direct impressions occur in varied social settings (Jones et al., Prologue xii). As an insistent and compelling biological need, eating necessarily has an immediacy and primacy unique among our concerns and endeavors (Jones et al., Resources and Methods 91). Yet eating also constitutes a decidedly social experience. Food scholars point out that there is perhaps no more fundamental act than that of sharing food, whether food and drink are distributed to strangers, offered to friends, or used as the basis of, as well as the justification for, interacting with others (Jones et al., Resources and Methods 91). At the same time, eating is personal; as a physiological necessity, sensory experience, and emotional or intellectual experience, eating is always a singular act (Jones et al., Resources and Methods 91). Food is thus a unique subject because the sensory and social dimensions of eating combine with the primacy of food as necessary to existence.

The multifaceted research on food has already influenced film studies. Volumes like Anne Bower’s Reel Food: Essays on Food and Film (2004), together with the many articles that examine representations of food in films, have shown that exploring food’s dense connotations facilitates new insights into films. Building on the work that has shed light on the food film genre, and on representations of food in various genres, by selected auteurs, and in different national cinemas, our book identifies the value of amending ideological analyses of film to include foodways as a critical lens. Foregrounding the foodways paradigm, which provides a model for analyzing the behaviors and beliefs surrounding the production, distribution, and consumption of food (Counihan, Anthropology 6), this book does not aim simply to further the study of food in film. Instead, it proposes that the foodways paradigm illuminates distinct and significant factors to consider when doing ideological studies. As with work on race, class, and gender, insights generated by foodways analysis will often intersect with ones arising from the use of other critical lenses. Yet, as the unique discoveries made possible by other approaches to ideological analysis suggest, the foodways paradigm provides a special set of questions when examining films’ cultural politics. When looking at films in terms of foodways, the pleasures, dangers, and implications of consumption take center stage.

Scholarship has shown that any film and any aspect of film can be analyzed from an ideological perspective. Thus, in the same way that cinematic representations of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, class, and colonial status warrant careful analysis, films’ representations of food and food behavior can be examined to better understand their politics. Moreover, as this volume aims to demonstrate, analyzing films through the foodways lens produces readings that illuminate their cultural and material politics—even if food never appears in the film.

Foodways offers a powerful lens for ideological studies of film because food has an ambiguous, unpredictable, contentious, and high-stakes status in consumer society. A dual-edged object of promise and threat, food now has an uncertain character. From everyday life we know that food can enliven social relations, enrich spiritual affairs, and enhance an individual’s sense of well-being (Jones et al., The Sensory Domain 2). At the same time, food can be used to threaten, seduce, punish and in other ways manipulate behavior (Jones et al., The Sensory Domain 2).

Today, food occupies contentious territory because the transition to consumer and media society that accelerated in the mid-twentieth century has involved an uneven and multifaceted transformation of human subjectivity. On the one hand, consuming has become a way of life; consumer choices denote an individual’s identity. In consumer society, purchasing food offers an opportunity to express individuality, while producing food has become largely meaningless. As Mark Bittman notes, In 1900, 41 percent of American workers were employed in agriculture, whereas in 2008 that number [was] less than 2 percent (21). Produced and received like any other consumer product, food tends to be processed, sold, and consumed as quickly as possible. Moreover, the long-term costs of extraction, production, distribution, consumption, and disposal are externalized by food companies; the industry puts responsibility for any of the food system’s side effects on individual consumers. In food- and media-saturated society, consumers learn to be satisfied with homogeneity, even to trust it, for corporations design food (and media) to be quickly recognizable, convenient, and the source of easily accessed feelings of pleasure.

At the same time, food’s pervasive, personal, and crucial role in human life and human interactions has led to perspectives where food is not just another product in consumer society. Belasco and others document the emergence of a countercuisine in the mid-twentieth century (Belasco, Appetite for Change 4). Belasco identifies three elements that continue to inform this alternative perspective on food: a consumerist component that encourages people to avoid processed food; a therapeutic component that invites people to embrace improvisation, craftsmanship, [and] ethnic and regional cooking; and a production/distribution component that values organic food production and a radically decentralized infrastructure consisting of communal farms, cooperative groceries, and hip restaurants (Appetite 4). From this perspective, food is not a commodity but instead a human right; food is not an industrial product but instead an aesthetic and cultural object that necessarily reflects the values of individuals and societies. From this perspective, a person’s relationship with food is both personal and political. Whereas the dominant model of food as a consumer product separates personal and political into separate realms, from the countercuisine perspective, personal choices about food are political. For example, Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet (1971) illustrates that personal choices counter or contribute to industrialized societies’ cultural pattern of waste (Appetite 58).

The conflicting visions of food that have fueled debates in industrialized societies since the late 1960s make foodways a valuable paradigm for ideological studies of film. The zealous partisanship and deep-seated uncertainties surrounding food in consumer society also help to explain the emergence of food films, which often feature cooking, chefs, restaurants, food shops, kitchens, and family meals, and consistently depict characters negotiating questions of identity, power, culture, class, spirituality, or relationship through food (Bower 6). The emergence of food films as a discernible genre in the 1980s and audience interest in these films can be tied to the familiar idea that film genres reflect an era’s aspirations and anxieties. Hollywood’s profit-based interest in distributing films that might tap into elite consumption trends, and international cinema’s calculation that narratives with exotic food can attract upscale audiences attuned to culinary tourism, also explains the increased visibility of a genre in which food-related activities are the primary means for conveying character and situation.

Some observers see no connection between the emergence of the food film genre and the rising significance of food in competing perspectives about consumer society. Describing the arrival of food films in the 1980s as a matter of food finally receiving its due, Steve Zimmerman and Ken Weiss write that a few directors (initially foreign) [eventually] discovered the visual, aesthetic and box office appeal of food (256). However, other observers have identified food films, along with food documentaries, as responses to consumer society’s increasing interest in food as an object of promise and threat. Writing in 2009, Kim Severson, columnist for the New York Times, describes the ways that food films and then later food documentaries resonated with audiences: Movies about food used to make you want to eat. [In the] decade that spanned the mid-1980s to mid-1990s [it] took heroic resolve to walk out of the Japanese spaghetti western ‘Tampopo’ and not head directly to a ramen bar. Expanding on that point, Severson observes: Cooks spent entire months trying to recreate ‘Babette’s Feast’ and dreamed of rolling out pasta with Stanley Tucci in ‘Big Night.’ By the time Ang Lee’s ‘Eat Drink Man Woman’ came out in 1994, moviegoers had come to expect food films filled with glistening dumplings, magical desserts and technically perfect kitchen scenes (Severson Eat Drink).

Identifying changes that contributed to food documentaries’ increased production and visibility after 2000, Severson explains: But that was then, before Wal-Mart started selling organic food and Michelle Obama planted a vegetable garden on the White House lawn. Before E. coli was a constant in the food supply, before politicians tried to tax soda and before anyone gave much thought to the living conditions of chickens (Severson Eat Drink). Severson’s observations succinctly capture the contrast between the era when mainstream food films reflected budget surpluses and dotcom profits and the more anxious time when audiences became receptive to films like Food, Inc. (Kenner, 2008), which critique the state of the nation’s food system [and are] part of a new generation of food films that drip with politics, not sauces (Severson Eat Drink). As Severson notes, Food, Inc. does not promote the unquestioned pleasures of lavish and exotic meals that come together by magic but instead presents eat-your-peas cinema that could make viewers not want to eat anything at all (Severson Eat Drink).

Amplifying Severson’s insights, we propose that food films and food documentaries have found an audience because they capture the aspirations and the anxieties of people in consumer society who live with the promise and threat of industrialized food production as well as the promise and threat of slow cooking, organic food, and local sources. Weighing the polarized perspectives on food in consumer society, we find that food films—which explore the social politics surrounding gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, cultural background, and community status through characters’ interactions with food—exist on a spectrum that features utopian visions of food and society on one end and dystopian visions on the other.

The food film genre has often been identified with movies like Big Night (Scott and Tucci, 1996) and Julie and Julia (Ephron, 2009). The utopian vision of food and society expressed by these films warrants consideration; as Belasco points out, for Americans, Food is the first of the essentials of life, our biggest industry, our greatest export, and our most frequently indulged pleasure. However, in a global food system plagued by food insecurity for some and obesity related disease for others, food also epitomizes an object of considerable concern and dread [because what] we eat and how we eat it together may constitute the single most important cause of disease and death (Belasco, Meals to Come vii). Thus, it is equally important to attend to food films that present ambivalent or even negative feelings toward food and food behaviors. Food films at the dystopian end of the spectrum include La Grande Bouffe (The Big Feast, Ferreri, 1973) and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (Greenaway, 1989).

With its attention to all the beliefs and activities surrounding food and food behaviors, foodways provides a conceptual framework for analyzing the societal and cultural factors that lead to food films’ utopian and dystopian representations of food. Yet the foodways lens not only prompts one to consider the spectrum of experiences depicted in the food film genre, it also leads one to see that food films and food documentaries are best understood together, as responses to conflicting perspectives about food in consumer society. As the food film genre began to emerge in the 1980s, so did food documentaries. While initially not as visible as the fictional food films, documentaries like Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers (Blank, 1980) and Fragile Harvest (Lang, 1986) led to a wave of food documentaries.

Emerging as they do in the 1980s, food films and food documentaries represent identifiable responses to the perception that industrialized countries’ escalating reliance on processed, packaged convenience foods was erasing personal, regional, and national identities. Thus, just as food films exist on a spectrum, food documentaries present individuals’ interactions with food in ways that range from utopian to dystopian. Food documentaries include productions such as Good Food (Dworkin and Young, 2008), which celebrates the work of people contributing to a sustainable food system in the Pacific Northwest, and films such as The End of the Line (Murray, 2009), which examines the devastating consequences of overfishing around the globe.

Food documentaries reflect the same cultural understanding as food films, namely, that people’s choices of food and drink matter enormously. However, when one considers food films and food documentaries together and through the foodways lens, both lines of work come into sharper focus. In both instances food functions as a window, yet in the fiction films, food behaviors provide a window into individual characters and the social milieu. By comparison, in food documentaries, food mirrors individuals’ and societies’ relationship with nature. In addition, with the industrial food system presented most often as a threat to health, community stability, and the environment, food documentaries more directly highlight social inequality, resource crises, and systemic institutional problems. By exploring ways in which agriculture is a part of nature and culture, food documentaries also call attention to all aspects of the food cycle, from production to disposal. As a consequence, food documentaries foreground aspects of food that are often elided in food films.

In addition to providing a rubric for analyzing food films and food documentaries together, foodways illuminates the fact that food documentaries supplement food films by showing the unsavory practices the food industry hides. The foodways lens thus provides a logic for seeing films on a continuum marked by what viewers do and do not see of food production, preparation, consumption, cleanup, and disposal. Looking at films from a foodways perspective casts their representations of identity and labor into sharp relief. The approach leads one to see that films often only show the pleasures of food consumption and that they generally ignore the actual labor and the troubled cultural dynamics behind food procurement, preparation, and cleanup. In sum, the foodways lens leads one to consider the identity politics surrounding food in film as well as the economic factors that make certain aspects of the food system untenable subjects for most narrative films.

As with representations of gender, sexuality, and other categories of identity, the political and economic institutions that shape film production, distribution, and exhibition also influence representations of food and food behavior. Mainstream representations of everything that has to do with food and drink are refracted through the vested interests of the food and entertainment industries. Designed to contribute to studies in political economy, this volume examines the intersection between the film and food industries and in particular the consequences of the film industry’s self-censorship practices that keep it in good standing with the food industry. Through various mechanisms, the film industry colludes with the food industry by promoting utopian food films and marginalizing food documentaries critical of the food industry. It works to ensure that films like Ratatouille (Bird and Pinkava, 2007) reach as wide an audience as possible—its domestic box office was over $200 million and its international theatrical box office topped $400 million—and that films like McLibel (Armstrong, 2005) reach as few people as possible—it made $4,000 in its domestic theatrical release. Foodways, with its focus on where food comes from and where food ultimately ends up, cannot help but direct attention to industry practices. The book’s examination of industry and economy is one of the most crucial components of our work as we seek to integrate studies of film with work in food studies, a field that has been concerned with personal expression and political economy from its inception.

The Politics of Food’s Past, Present, and Future

The polarized views of food that emerged in the mid-twentieth century developed into the food wars of the 1970s, with food companies and government agencies showing how dominant forces oppose what they perceive as deviant ideas (Belasco, Appetite 112). However, in the food-ideological battles of the 1970s, radicals scored points too, forcing adjustments and compromises (Belasco, Appetite 112). In the 1970s, the oil crisis and policies established by Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz put an end to the post-war food order and contributed to the U.S. farm crisis of the 1980s when world demand slackened, energy and credit costs skyrocketed, and land values plummeted (Patel 91; Belasco, Appetite 133). Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, a steady stream of news reports about problems in the food system eventually created a lasting perception of technology out of control (Belasco, Appetite 172).

This turbulence led to interest in food films and food documentaries. It also stimulated research in the interdisciplinary field of food studies. From the 1980s forward, analyzing the role of food in human history posed one of the monumental tasks undertaken by food scholars. Their research has shown that food is intimately linked to the foundation of civilization. It has revealed that the domestication of plants and nonhuman animals for food in the Neolithic era was a historical event even more important than the internal combustion engine or nuclear energy (Mintz, qtd. in Belasco, Food Matters 3). Describing the role food plays in human society, Sidney Mintz explains, The history of our food systems sets us dramatically apart from the rest of the animal world (Food and Diaspora 513).

Food scholarship has shown that food is a troubling, paradoxical subject. On the one hand, the food quest may be the unrecognized birthplace of the paired concepts of locality and culture (Mintz, Food and Diaspora 515). On the other, agriculture spawned guns, germs, and steel—the principal material drivers of civilization and conquest (Diamond, qtd. in Belasco, Food Matters 3). Discussing food’s primary role in European exploration and colonization, Belasco concludes: It is no coincidence that today’s billion or so beneficiaries of what might be called the Great Imperial Barbecue suffer from caloric overload, while the ex-colonies that initially supplied those wonder foods now house the poorest fed third of the world’s six billion people (Food Matters 3, 4).

Food’s place in human history not only shaped the cultures and power structures that exist today; its role in the future of human life is equally significant. As Belasco writes: for an individual or a society, probably nothing is more frightening or far-reaching than the prospect of running out of food (Meals vii). Yet the specter of scarcity poses only one of the terrifying prospects when it comes to the future of food; the industrialized food industry and the damage it causes to the planet present an equally serious cause for alarm. Mark Bittman begins Food Matters (2009) discussing a report by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization that finds global livestock production is responsible for about one-fifth of all greenhouse gases—more than transportation. He then incorporates food’s threat-promise dichotomy: while the current "American diet, high in meat, refined carbohydrates, and junk food, is driven by a destructive form of food production . . . by simply changing what we eat we can have an immediate impact on our own health and a very real effect on global warming—and the environment, and animal cruelty, and food prices" (1, 3, 4; emphasis in original).

Opposing constituencies, all with a stake in the future of food, hold polarized views about how to address the looming threats to food security. The United Nations argues for an approach that directly challenges the position of institutions like the World Bank and Monsanto, which persuade the United States and other governments that global food security will only result from more of the miraculous productivity gains made possible by free-market capitalism and biotechnology (Belasco, Meals ix). A 2010 report by the United Nation’s Special Rapporteur on the right to food explains that by reorienting their agriculture systems towards modes of production that are highly productive [and] highly sustainable, countries can respond effectively to the ongoing ecological, food and energy crises (De Schutter). In its press release on the report, the United Nations highlights the fact that small-scale farmers can double food production within 10 years in critical regions using ecological methods (Eco-Farming). It also points out that extensive review of the recent scientific literature supports the United Nations’s conclusion that agro-ecological methods, which use ecological science in agricultural activities, outperform chemical fertilizers in boosting food production . . . especially in unfavorable environments (Eco-Farming).

Since the 1970s, Monsanto, Nestlé, Vivendi, Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, ConAgra, and other food industry giants have demonized reports that demonstrate the value of low-input agriculture. Their attacks have swayed public opinion because the food industry is supported by financial institutions, trade associations, and pharmaceutical companies in ways that allow food companies to control global distribution of food and water. Shaping a complex field of activity that includes restaurants, school lunch programs, commodity trading floors, delivery trucks, and garbage dumps, the food industry’s reach extends into magazines and blogs where food as an expression of personal identity is not a topic to be analyzed but instead a promise of satisfaction to the person who knows how to consume. Cooking shows and cookbooks support the food industry by offering a menu of lifestyle choices.

Articulating the countercuisine perspective, writers like Marion Nestle, author of Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health (2007), have persuasively critiqued the industrialized food system. Reactions against the dominant food system have also led to nothing less than a social movement (Nestle ix). Nestle explains that this movement comprises several campaigns that all strive to create a better food future. Consistently opposed to corporate control of food, the campaigns aim to secure a future in which food is plentiful, accessible, healthy, and humanely produced.¹

While the ongoing battles between the food industry and the countercuisine movements are distinguished by the scope of considerations that impact their agendas, the study of food in popular culture texts such as film has often focused on the moment when food is eaten (or, in some cases, not eaten). That is to be expected. Lucy Long explains that as the visible focal point of a range of activities, meals are a starting point for examining [the] extended network of activities surrounding the procurement, preservation, preparation, presentation, performance, and consumption of food (144). Echoing the idea that meals offer a useful starting point, Belasco outlines ways to examine food in popular culture texts. He observes that films use food as an enabler of or substitution for sexual relationships or as a means by which people communicate (Food: The Key Concepts 37). He notes that meals are used to advance the plot, enable key conversations, and ground characters in daily rituals (Food 37). A few of Belasco’s suggestions point toward analysis of where food comes from and where it ends up. He notes that as a demographic marker (gender, race, class, region, etc.), food has great potential to awaken the viewer to the politics of food in film (Food 37).

Thus, patterns of study cause meals to be a focal point of analysis. Yet meals are also central to studies because popular culture texts feature food consumption. As Belasco explains, from the beginning of the twentieth century, commercial media has supported mass consumption, especially of convenience foods (Appetite 156). Tracing developments in magazines, films, and television, Belasco points out that in the studio era "Hollywood’s physically splendid performers led such busy, exciting lives that they had