We love sexy food: the dressed-up dishes on cooking shows, a camera zooming in on an angelically lit plate. The influencer’s video that’s less about food than vibes. The ambrosial spreads in ads. Food porn titillates the senses to sell an idea, a product or an experience: the memorable opulent meal, the communion of sharing food as a sacred rite. But three recent releases have perverted this approach, offering extravagantly composed plates that traumatize, not tantalize.
In “The Bear,” the meaning of the beautiful food that Chef Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) creates now that he is finally running his own upscale establishment has changed. It represents old grievances, lingering fears and simmering power struggles. Season 3 opens with an expressionist self-portrait: no plot, just scenes of Carmy working, interspersed with flashbacks of him in kitchens run by chefs he’s idolized.
Some of the memories evoke a visceral joy: Carmy wistfully strolling among fields of veggies and making vibrantly detailed illustrations of menu ideas. He admires a photo of one successful creation that could be a salad, arranged like a bouquet. A sunburst of something orange lies petaled and sectioned like a flower, resting on a bed of wild greens. Carmy texts a picture of the arrangement to his brother, Mikey, who is baffled. The message is clear to the audience, though. It’s not just sustenance we’re admiring; it’s art.
Scenes of present-day Carmy lack this brightness, literally and figuratively. Kitchen shots are harshly lit to match his clinical approach to the work. Instead of loving glances of plated dishes, we get unsatisfying teases of food that fly by in succession. When Carmy’s frustration mounts and his expectations become impossible for anyone — even him — to meet, mouthwatering meals are swept aside. Two juicy-looking strips of Wagyu beef are flung into the trash, the metal kitchenware clanging violently against the lid, because, Carmy says curtly, “the cook is off.”
Carmy’s diminishing relationship with food provides the closest thing “The Bear” has to an enticing conflict. As he settles into the early weeks of running a fine-dining hot spot, he’s increasingly haunted by memories of his tutelage under the sadistic David Fields (Joel McHale). In flashbacks we see Chef David craning over Carmy predatorily, ready with a bitter rebuke or challenge. By season’s end, food is no longer a comfort for Carmy; producing the requisite artful plate of food is necessary to his restaurant’s survival.
Cooking as survival is also the main quest of the popular Netflix fantasy anime series “Delicious in Dungeon,” about a group of dungeon explorers who must fight, and eat, fantastical monsters they encounter along the way. The monsters get served up in each episode in a Food Network-style sequence, often narrated by Senshi, a food connoisseur.
Though “Delicious in Dungeon” presents a world of mythological beasts, real-world food ethics apply. Characters exist at the brink of starvation and they tiptoe into defining cannibalism in a world where species distinctions blur. When one character balks at another’s suggestion that they eat a merman, the latter replies, “Why can we eat cow but not a fish-man?” Some lines, the show posits, shouldn’t be crossed.
Yet there’s no place for sentimentality when it comes to eating for survival. When Senshi’s supposedly harmless kelpie friend — a shape-shifter who appears as a majestic water horse — nearly kills him, the team kills it, and Senshi immediately starts butchering.
“You were that fond of her, and now you’re going to eat her? Unbelievable!,” another character says in shock. Then they enjoy a steakhouse-style spread of kelpie meat — deep-carmine-colored slabs next to glistening cuts of fat-marbled meat and rich-looking tail pieces, arranged with lettuce and onions.
“Delicious in Dungeon” meals look appealing, but the beauty is also morbidly ironic. For all the ways the show parodies and honors cooking programs, it also maintains a thoroughly vicious perspective: We are all part of a bigger food chain, and we’re all animals fighting to survive.
Control or submit is also a major theme in Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Kinds of Kindness,” released in June. In one vignette, Daniel (Jesse Plemons) is a cop who is destabilized by the disappearance of his wife, Liz (Emma Stone), a marine biologist. She was shipwrecked (and perhaps resorted to cannibalism), and is later found, but Daniel is convinced that the rescued woman is an impostor.
He tests her, refusing to eat her cooking. When she offers to make anything he wants, he demands she chop off her finger and saute it. Lanthimos relentlessly tracks her decision process and the pain of sawing off her own thumb. He zooms in on the browned finger alongside cauliflower on the plate, a grim perversion of a quaint domestic scene, a depiction of the elegant, refined dish that violent Darwinism can sometimes be.
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