Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Bringing Something New to the Table
Tom Hertweck
Part I: First Courses: Opening Up New Directions in Food and Film
1. “The Average Piece of Junk Is Probably More Meaningful Than Our Criticism Designating It So”: Reading (Rhetorically) the Restaurant Review in Disney/Pixar’s Ratatouille
Elisabeth H. Buck
2. Table Talk: Queer Revelations through Meals in Filipino Gay-Male Films
Mark DeStephano, S.J.
3. “A Nice Cup of Tea”: Tea Culture in 1930s and 1940s British Documentary Film
Lynn Hilditch
Part II: Food and African American Film
4. Eat the Right Thing: The Urban Food Desert of Spike Lee’s Bed-Stuy
Deborah Adelman
5. “So Good Make You Wanna Slap Yo Mama”: Race, Gender, and Eating in the Comedy Film ’Hood
Jessica Fanaselle and Joshua Culpepper
6. From Disgust to Gustatory Pleasure: The Evolution of Alimentary and Moral Repulsion in Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple
Lynn R. Johnson
Part III: Feeding the Family: New Directions in Food and Non-American Film
7. Taste, Honor, and Tradition in Il Mafioso
Memory Holloway
8. Food, Family, and History in Japanese Postwar Film: Four Cases and a Few Comparisons
Charles W. Hayford
9. Appetite and Aroma: Visual Imagery and the Perception of Taste and Smell in Contemporary Korean Film
Dotty Hamilton
Part IV: Small Screens, Big Appetites: Food and Television
10. Dale Cooper and the Mouth-Feel of Twin Peaks
Andrew Hageman
11. Food and Conversation in Sex and the City: Fashion Consumed, Sex Digested
Glenda Sacks
Part V: Eating Humans: New Ideas on the Oldest Taboo
12. “Little Shakin’, Little Tenderizin’, and Down You Go”: Jaws and Humanity’s Fear of Finding Itself on the Menu
Mark R. Bousquet
13. Sacrament to Sacrilege: Human Flesh as Sustenance in Alive and The Road
Jennifer Dawes Adkison
14. New Zealand Lamb Is People: Bad Taste, Black Sheep, and Farming
Christian B. Long
Index
About the Editor and Contributors

About the Author

Tom Hertweck teaches courses on film, adaptation, the poetics of food, and various topics in American literature and cultural history at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Reviews

Pleasure layering takes center stage in Tom Hertweck’s Food on Film. The author explores depictions of food from the earliest days of movies up to the present.
*Campus Circle*

True to the collection's title, the contributors to this volume use food as a trope to engage in novel analyses of a number of films and television programs already well worn by conventional interpretations. Hertweck organized the book into five parts, the first of which, 'First Courses,' comprises essays meant to demonstrate the new directions through which food might be used in film analysis and criticism. The remaining four parts focus specifically on African American film, non-American film, television, and films broaching the subject of cannibalism. The contributors use film to connect to larger social and cultural issues—for example, the authority of the male and the commensurate impotence of the female in black culture, national and personal identity, and the impact of globalization and genetic engineering on societies generally. . . .[A]t its best, the collection is creative, provocative, and epistemic. It can be read in conjunction with Reel Food, ed. by Anne Bower, and James Keller’s Food, Film and Culture. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals.
*CHOICE*