Meals on Reels, the link between food and cinema

7 years ago

Food has always been the protagonist of the cinema, both in Italy and internationally, making an “insatiable” relationship between the two become established.
The close bond that has been created is also testified by the numerous films in which food becomes the absolute protagonist, almost a living character. These two worlds, though very distant, intersect and play a very important role in our lives because they both represent a sort of desire: on the one hand we have the “utopian dream” of living inside the film and on the other the desire to eat delicacies.

Food allows social development because from birth it is one of the main mediators in relationships. The cinema, which mainly shows relationships between human beings, could not ignore the various symbologies in human relations in the act of eating. From the very first films, food immediately became the protagonist, as, for example, the Lumière brothers presented Le rèpas de Bebè on 28 December 1985, a family life scene in which a child was fed by his parents.

The dishes in the films are used as a narrative thread, as a metaphor, as the core of dialogue and above all as an element capable of characterizing the characters and their personalities.

Film critic Kristen Yoonsoo Kim created an account on Instagram called Meals on Reels in 2017. The project recounts this link by focusing on auteur and independent films.
During an interview for AnOther Magazine, Kristen tells how she came up with the idea of creating a page that could contain all the most symbolic frames of the films in which people eat.
She explains that it all started while she was seeing a scene that has remained imprinted on her from the movie “Perfect Friday“, a Peter Hall comedy of the seventies, in which Ursula Andress bites a piece of bread.
Instead, the inspiration for the name of the page came while watching David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, in which in one scene the main character Laura Palmer says “can’t do Meals on Wheels that day“.
Since then Kim, on the profile Meals on Reels, placed several images about twice a week, accompanying the frames with the title of the film, year and director.