Food and Movies

Not the food you take TO the movies, not even the food you buy AT the movies (can you call that food really?). No, I mean the food IN movies.

In movies like
Like Water for Chocolate
Chocolat
Fried Green Tomatoes
Under the Tuscan Sun
and plenty of others I don't recall right now, food features. Food may as well be one of the main characters, a protagonist of sorts. How did it come to be that food features so prominently in film? Maybe it all started with the slapstick pie-in-the-face of silent films.

How can entire movies be about food? I guess they are not so much about the food itself but what the food signifies. And what does food signify? Both in real life and in the movies, food is ...
creative, an outlet for creativity
love, a display of loving
lust, desire, sexual
fulfillment
contentment
giving (not just the food itself but also giving of one's own creativity)
enjoying
family, home
a reason to gather together
comfort, comforting
sharing (as in sharing the experience of eating good food)
relating to one another, individually or across cultures, through food
sensual
emotional
memory (do you have childhood memories about food?), history

Most of my memories (the good ones at least) are about food. Actually, I have a bad one about food, too: Too much watermelon, throwing up on the kitchen floor, having to clean it up. In the movie The Witches of Eastwick, do you remember the scene about the cherries? I couldn't eat cherries for a few years after that.

Food is one of those things that you use most of your senses for. (You see it. Is it visually pleasing? You taste it. Does it have a good flavor? You feel it in your mouth. What is the texture? You smell it. What's the scent? When you cook, you also hear it. Is it boiling, is it searing, is it crackling, is it still? ) And maybe since we all eat, it's one of those things we can all understand and appreciate in our individual experience, whether limited or broad. And maybe that universality is why food is so well used in film as representing all those various aspects of life.

What do you think? What are some other movies where food features and what does it symbolize?